


Best of the Worst Times

by Lemon_Lemmings



Series: Turnips [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Arguing, Castration, Drinking to Cope, Drug Withdrawal, Drugs, Gen, Hallucinations, Hunk (Voltron) Whump, Hunk (Voltron)-centric, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Torture, Minor Character Death, Minor Violence, Muteness, Original Character(s), Overdosing, Self-Harm, Swearing, Timeline What Timeline, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Vomiting, situational depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-07
Updated: 2018-11-26
Packaged: 2019-06-23 01:31:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 36,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15595260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lemon_Lemmings/pseuds/Lemon_Lemmings
Summary: It’s not that Hunk expects himself to get over it overnight. But he shouldwantto get over it. He should be able to cope and he should have the drive to cope, at least. He should be interested in the ideas his friends have to compensate for the blind spot, or regarding alternative means of communication. He should be interested in getting better. But he’s just…not.He’d rather pull the blanket over his head and hide from the noise





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Wheeee, let's disturb the comedy relief, that's real fun. 
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> So this is a gen fic, but there's one kiss scene and it is not romantic in nature. There's also a short scene depicting workplace harassment, but it's not extreme. You don't really have to read the other two fics in this series for it to make sense, but it would possibly help provide context. 

Hunk breaks a lot of shit when no one is looking.

He rips his shelves from the walls in his room. He tears the Voltron Show poster off his ceiling and shreds it to strips. He smashes the mirror on the inside of his closet with a punch and gets silvery glass embedded in his knuckles.

This particular instance leaves him trembling and trapped in an ice cold sweat. It plunges him back into the moments his hands were bound by glass littered tape, back to every intrusion by endless stinging shards.

Breaking other things doesn’t make Hunk feel any less broken himself.

It’s just a series of outbursts from this helpless fury that roars and blazes like an out of control wildfire. He breaks things for days after his release from the pod. He breaks things until the fury inexorably burns him out, incinerating everything else in the process. His feelings are ashes and the lack of them makes him lag.

He spends more time away from his friends than with them, sleeps longer simply because he doesn’t have much drive to stay awake. Not in his room. There’s too much of a mess from all the things he’s broken and he’s too indifferent to clean it up. He sleeps in Keith’s room instead. It’s already empty while he’s off with the Blades and it’s not like he’ll ever know.

Hunk doesn’t touch anything. Or he wouldn’t, rather, if there were things to touch. Not too long ago he would’ve touched everything if there were in fact things to touch. Snooping used to be fun. But as Hunk thinks back on it, it seems kind of childish and fun is a regrettably fading concept.

Regardless of whether he would or wouldn’t touch, Keith apparently isn’t much of a packrat. There isn’t anything of his in here aside from the Red Paladin armor. Hunk used to clean it now and then, buff it out and polish it up. Always keeping it neat for Keith in case he got tired of his Marmora suit. It’s been awhile since he’s done that. It’s begun to collect dust again.

But now that’s even less than the last thing Hunk feels like caring about.

* * *

Hunk has good friends. Amazing friends, actually, the kind who would give him the world if they could. They’d die for him, they’d kill for him. Lance literally killed for him, not out of defense and not out of revenge either, Hunk doesn’t believe.

Probably because in his eyes, it simply wasn’t excusable to let anyone who grievously maimed Hunk continue breathing. He feels the same way about Lance. If it’d been Lance—

But it wasn’t, and as good as Lance is, as amazing as all his friends are, Hunk finds himself bitter. He would never wish what he went through on any of them…in a warped kind of way, he supposes that he’s the best of the bunch it could’ve possibly happened to. His designation is support, his role is, for better or worse, that of a shield. In this case, it was for worse.

But he’s a shield specifically because he can take hits. He’s supposed to be able to, anyway. He’s supposed to absorb them, sturdy and steadfast. Except he can’t really absorb this. Unlike his friends who seem to be flourishing in their roles, Hunk has crumbled out of his.

This was war. Losing pieces of himself was always a possibility. Maybe even an inevitability. It’s something Hunk ought to be able to handle. It’s not that he expects himself to get over it overnight. But he should _want_ to get over it. He should be able to cope and he should have the drive to cope, at least.

He should be interested in the ideas his friends have to compensate for the blind spot, or regarding alternative means of communication. He should be interested in getting better. But he’s just…not.

When they try to help, Hunk just wishes the floor would open and swallow him up. They try so hard. They mean well and he wants to be receptive to them, but forcing it calls for motivation he doesn’t have. Seeing the disappointment on their faces when their best efforts fail will bring pain he doesn’t have the stamina for.

He’d rather pull Keith’s blanket over his head and hide from the noise. It’s not even that he doesn’t want to put in the effort, it’s that he doesn’t feel like he has any effort left to put in. Just the contemplation of working his way around all these new obstacles is exhausting.

Hunk doesn’t want to deal with it.

He doesn’t want to hurt his friends, who love so much, who try so hard. He can’t bring himself to try half as hard and it’s horrible when his purpose is to absorb. In reality, he doesn’t even want to face what’s happened.

He doesn’t want much of anything, other than for it not to have happened at all.

* * *

 “Would you like a reprieve from piloting?” Allura asks softly.

Hunk tilts his head.

“There are always other jobs,” Allura continues. “That isn’t to say you wouldn’t be called on if Voltron were needed, but beyond that, it’s perfectly acceptable if you would like to forgo piloting.”

Allura keeps a straight face but Hunk watches her hands. They’re folded neatly, but she keeps rolling her thumbs over each other. She is deceptively uncomfortable, though for which part, Hunk doesn’t know.

Hunk only shrugs. It doesn’t particularly matter one way or the other. His Lion’s been quiet since he’s returned. Hunk thinks it might feel the way he does, a little bit.

“Just let me know,” Allura says.

Hunk gives a short, neutral nod.

Allura doesn’t leave like he expects her to. She moves forward and hugs him lightly, holding him as though he’s fragile. The way Hunk holds eggs before he cracks them open. The natural thing to do would be to hug her back.

But the affectionate reflex is stunted and he finds himself at a loss as her voice feathers against his ear.

“If there’s anything else I can do, I will,” she promises. “Anything. All of us will, surely you know?”

She too, is a good friend. He doesn’t blame her nearly as much as she blames herself. That isn’t to say he believes there’s a total absence of blame. Allura is the Blue Paladin now. She’s Voltron’s other leg, his counterpart, his other half, so to speak.

So yeah, maybe he blames he a little bit. Maybe he feels like she should’ve been by his side, but it’s probably just the bitterness bleeding over. Allura tried her best. She always does. It isn’t truly her fault it happened and he should try to talk her out of feeling that way. Maybe he’d give it a go too, if he could actually talk.

The thought pushes a dark breath of a laugh past his lips. Even that sounds different without most of his tongue. Allura pulls back, looking at him curiously.

Hunk waves his hand dismissively. _Never mind,_ he hopes the motion conveys.

“Sorry?”

Sigh.

’Nothing,’ he mouths, deliberately shaping his lips around each syllable.

“Alright.” Allura clears her throat. “I’ll be recovered in the next quintant or so. I was planning to respond to the Nevprahs’ call for assistance. We weren’t called on to battle, simply to transport the refugees sensitive to the climate. Not a dire emergency, but the sooner we provide aid, the better. Are you ready for a mission like that?”

Hunk pauses, considering. Why not, he figures. The sooner he gets back to being a paladin, the sooner he might start feeling normal. With that in mind, he gives a nod.

“Yes?” Allura smiles a little. “I’m glad. We could use you, you always have that knack for making others feel safe.”

Normally that kind of praise from Allura would be warming, but at the moment, Hunk’s just tired. He wants the conversation to be over so he can creep away and have some space before he’s expected to participate in something else. So he offers a thumbs up and turns around.

“Wait.”

Hunk halts, trying not to be annoyed. Allura comes around, fingers tented in an antsy pyramid.

“I was thinking,” she begins, her gaze up and down, all around. Everywhere but on him.  
“You see, spoken language wasn't the only one on Altea. We have a nonverbal language compromised primarily of hand signaling and gestures. I learned it long ago because one of my friends couldn’t hear. I was thinking I could teach it to you. It might be helpful and I’d like to share as much of my culture as I can, considering there’s not much of it left…”

Ugh. Hunk isn’t an idiot, he knows what sign language is. Even gorillas do, for crying out loud. Of fucking course the Altean one is going to be different than the variety of them found on Earth, but whatever he ends up doing, an alternate form of communication is going to be a necessity. There’s no reason for her to talk to him like this, no reason for her to frame learning one as some kind of culture sharing pastime as if he isn’t already painfully aware he can’t speak.

“Or you could teach me the script you and the other paladins write in,” Allura suggests, evidently sensing her idea wasn’t well received. “Or both. We have time.”

Hunk rubs his temples, trying to scoop up a positive response. Allura, just like all his other friends, is only trying to help. She misses talking to him as much as he misses talking to her, that’s all. She is his ally and getting mad isn’t going to help.

‘Maybe later,’ he mouths.

Allura slumps, her optimism waning. “I’m sorry?”

‘Not today,’ Hunk tries again.

There’s a pause as Allura’s brows knit together. Hunk can see her gears turning, but after a awkward beat of silence, she just shakes her head.

“I apologize, I still didn’t get that.”

For fuck’s sake.

Hunk grabs her by the wrist and leads her down the hall, into the lab where Pidge and Matt are knee-deep in nerd speak and scattered tech. They glance up as Hunk comes through with Allura. He lets go of her wrist and leans over Pidge, taking the tablet out of her lap.

“Hey!” she protests.

Hunk rolls his eyes and opens up a blank document, scribbling with the stylus.

_Tell Allura she has good ideas, but I’m not ready for them today._

He returns the tablet to Pidge.

“You better not have closed out of my—“ she breaks off, the irritation immediately evaporating from her voice as she reads. “Oh. Allura, Hunk says you have good ideas but he’s not ready for them today.”

“That’s quite alright,” she assures Hunk, hands waving. “To tell you the truth, I was planning to rest up today anyway. You have time to think it over, let me know what you decide whenever you’re ready.”

Hunk gives her finger guns, figuring she’ll get the gist. Lance flashes them all the time. And she does, comprehension smoothening her placid demeanor.

“Now that that’s settled, excuse me.” Allura politely dips her head and slips through the automatic doors.

“So, what kind of ideas did she have anyway?” Pidge raises a brow and passes Hunk the tablet.

 _Basically Altean sign language,_ Hunk scrawls in big print, showcasing it to Pidge and Matt.

“Really?” Pidge slaps her palm to her forehead. “No! Look, I know she’s trying but that’d be pointless. Alteans have been virtually extinct for thousands of years. Why should she teach you a language nobody’s going to understand?”

 _To preserve it,_ he writes.

It’s not something Pidge would get, after all, Italian is pretty widespread. But Hunk can see where Allura is coming from. His grandma is similarly protective over spoken Samoan. It’s the tongue of her ancestors and— oh, shit. He is slapped with the abrupt realization that he can’t speak it anymore. One more tier to add on the crap cake of circumstance.

Hunk isn't going to be able to converse with his Grandma in Samoan or pass it down to his kids, not in spoken form anyway.

Wait, kids?

That’s right, he can’t do that either.

“Okay fair,” Pidge agrees. “But still, it wouldn’t be very useful. Galra sign language on the other hand, is a thing. Most people we meet would understand it since they’ve been colonized…which is bad. Obviously. Nevertheless, if we’re going to be traveling across the universe, we’ve gotta be able to open a line of communication for you.”

 _I know,_ Hunk writes, though he can’t say he’s wild about the idea.

She’s doing it. The thing where she wants to help so bad, but it’s grating on him like nails on a chalkboard. He isn’t up to this, deciding what to do or how to compensate for being mostly tongueless. He just wants to be alone.

“Or,” she says, taking Matt’s tablet since Hunk still has hers. “We could modify a communicator that you can type into. I was thinking we could put it in your gauntlet or in a bracelet or something, so you can just wear it. I already designed a couple prototypes.”

Hunk wishes she would stop. It’s a mean thing to think. He doesn’t want to be ungrateful. He’s lucky to have her, but he’s also…he doesn’t have it in him to deal with this yet and she’s already bringing the designs up on the screen.

“So,” she continues. “It’d have two features. You could type into it and then project what you’re typing on a holo-screen for everybody else to read. Or you could choose a voice from a panel to read what you typed aloud. I could increase the volume for when you need a crowd to understand you, and we could integrate a whole bunch of voices so you’d have a good variety. Like, really cool ones, or scary ones, or different accents…”

Hunk fidgets uncomfortably, trying to keep a benign mask. Pidge’s eyes are sparkling. She’s really excited about this and she wants to help so bad, wants to fix everything for him. And Hunk doesn’t want to crush her hopes, but it’s just too much for him right now.

“I could use your help with the prototypes. You’re better with hardware than I am, but believe me when I tell you I’ve got a ton of ideas for the software. Forget modifying a communicator, we could even build a totally new thing! Either or, what do you think, Hunk?” she asks brightly.

Frankly, he thinks she should shut up. He thinks he never should’ve even left Keith’s room this morning. He thinks phony, synthetic voices are never going to replace his own no matter how cool they sound. But none of these are helpful thoughts.

“Pidge!” Matt interrupts suddenly, snapping his fingers. “Guess what I totally forgot to tell you? Lance unlocked a secret level in Demonsphere!”

“What?” she gasps, eyes narrowing in suspect. “No way!”

“Don’t believe me? Go see for yourself.”

“There is no secret level in Demonsphere,” she argues. “If there were, there’s no way Lance would be the one to find it.”

“I’m telling you he did,” Matt insists confidently.

“…huh.” Pidge purses her lips, skeptical. “I gotta know for sure. Here, Hunk.”

She swaps the tablets in his hands. “Look those designs over and tell me what you decide on, okay?”

Hunk quickly bobs his head. He hopes he doesn’t look as relieved as he feels as Pidge bounces from the room like a curious kitten.

“You looked like you could use a break,” Matt comments in her absence.

Hunk flinches guiltily.

“Hey, it’s okay,” he says, casually opening his arms. “I get it. I know how overzealous she can be. And it’s not just her, you’ve got this whole castle lining up, constantly asking what they can do to help or just deciding how to help when you don’t have the answers. Right?”

Hunk slumps, nodding tiredly.

“Not a bad thing,” Matt goes on. “It shows how much you’ve loved. But you still need some room to breathe, don’t you?”

 _Exactly_ , Hunk writes.

“I’m guessing she’s gonna come back here the second she finds out there’s no secret level.” Matt scratches his cheek. “So I gotta go. You wanna part ways or do you wanna have a drink?”

Hunk raises a brow.

“I’ve been holding onto to some celebration champagne Te’Osh was going to share with me after we retook her home planet,” Matt murmurs, eyes shaded by something sad. “She didn’t live to see that and I don’t really want to drink alone.”

Hunk thinks it over. It’d probably be easier just to go back to Keith’s room, bury himself under the blanket and soak in the silence. But alien alcohol holds an appeal too. It might be nice to get buzzed. Could be a relief to get drunk enough not to care that he feels as hollowed out as a corn husk.

_What are we celebrating?_

“Hmm. How about your rescue?”

 _Some rescue,_ is a thought that invades before Hunk can stop it. It’s a razor of a thought, cold and cutting. Hunk scolds himself for having it because that kind of thought is as unproductive as it is unfair.

He’s standing here, isn’t he?

Hunk turns his palms upward in a casual declaration of, _eh, why not._

Matt smiles and looks striking like his sister as he does so. It’s nearly identical to the look Pidge always gives Hunk after he reluctantly agrees to a project he’s skeptical of.

They go to the pool because no one ever goes to the pool. An upside down pool is also the perfect place to get in the mood for alien booze, which Hunk stares at uncertainly as Matt pops off the cap. The stuff is in a see-through octagonal bottle with a long neck. It looks like tar, thick and goopy and black.

“You’re over sixteen, right?” Matt asks, as if being old enough to drink is what Hunk’s concerned about.

He snorts, but scribbles on the tablet anyway.

_Think I’m 19._

“Good.”

Matt hesitates before he takes a swig of the stuff, his fingertips tenderly brushing over the label. When he finally drinks, it’s a long, hard swallow of it and Hunk doesn’t think the pained look on his face has anything to do with the taste. When Matt sets the bottle down, he swipes his mouth off with the corner of his sleeve.

“I guess it doesn’t matter that much. If you’re old enough to fight a war, you’re old enough to drink. But knowing makes me feel a little better anyway.”

Hunk takes the bottle and gives it an experimental sniff. It smells a lot like jet fuel and he downs a good gulp anyway. It’s like drinking noxious honey and it chills the back of his throat. He gulps some more down and then passes the bottle back to Matt, writing a question.

_What was she like?_

“Te’Osh?” Matt watches Hunk as he tips his head back.

Hunk nods.

Matt unwraps his mouth from the lip the bottle, goes quiet as he passes it back to Hunk.

“Kinda like Shiro,” he hums after a moment. “Strong, noble hero type. She comes— _came_ off really cool at first, but she could be the biggest dork. I always tried to make her laugh in our downtime because she had the weirdest sounding laugh ever. Like someone stepping on one of Baebae’s squeaky toys, over and over.”

Hunk’s already starting to feel the buzz come on as he takes another swig. His head’s getting tingly and his body is loosening up. He can see it’s starting to get to Matt too, he picks up on the sound of it in Matt’s voice.

“It’s not fair, I…I don’t wanna sound like a whiny kid, but really? She couldn’t just live to see Kythra freed? The universe couldn’t give her that much?”

Hunk scoots over to him and gently squeezes his shoulder. Matt slumps right up against him, blinking back the mist Hunk doesn’t miss gathering in his eyes.

“She saved my life and I never even got to say goodbye.”

 _That’s messed up,_ Hunk writes.

Matt takes another swig and then Hunk does too. It goes like this so on and so fourth, making its trips between them.

.  
.  
.

By the time they’re down to half the rather generous bottle, they’re both on the ground and it isn’t the good kind of drunk with laughing and playful stupidity. It’s the sad kind of drunk, with all those repressed skeletons tumbling out of the closet, bones clattering on the floor in admissions of pain and regret.

“You could still talk,” Matt slurs at one point, clumsily swiping at the blood on Hunk’s knuckles with his cape.

Hunk didn’t mean to punch the wall, exactly. He didn’t mean to explode, but the explosion just happened inside him and he had to get it outside somehow.

“People who get their tongues removed because of disease or injury can learn to talk again,” he continues. “You still have some of yours, right? Let’s see whatcha got there.”

Hunk scowls and bats his hand away to pick up the tablet again. He fumbles with the stylus and it takes him a couple tries to get down anything legible.

_No._

“Why not?”

_It’s ugly._

“Believe me, I’ve seen worse,” Matt mutters.

Hunk takes another drink and curiosity gets the better of him.

_How much worse?_

“You really want to know?” Matt’s eyebrow lifts in a sandy arch.

Hunk nods.

“Then you’re gonna hafta gimme that.” Matt waggles a finger at the bottle.

Hunk takes one more sip and hands it over. Matt just about finishes it off.

“Yex was my cellmate in the second camp I got transferred to,” Matt starts. “Gutsy guy, real determined to escape. Liked me right away. He said he could tell I was smart. The Galra called Earth primitive, so that kinda surprised me to hear that not all aliens thought that way.”

Maybe a smile ghosts over Matt’s lips. Maybe it’s just a trick of the weird green light shimmering off of the Altean pool.

“Yex would gush to me about every single idea, but he never tried to pressure me to participate. I didn’t want to get punished and he understood that, but he still wanted to share his plans with me. Formulating them was the only thing keeping him going, I think. They gave him a reason to try. When I finally decided to help, it was all my decision. I even rallied some others. We almost made it too…”

 _He died in the escape attempt?_ Hunk pens with the stylus, frowning.

“Nope. We all got whipped and sent back to our cells without food. Except Yex.” Matt audibly swallows and grips the bottle. “I didn’t see him until the next day. When they did bring him back, it was eyeless and limbless.”

Hunk shudders.

“He had less tongue than you, but there was still a lil’ smidgen left.” Matt pinches together his thumb and forefinger.

 _What happened to him?_ Hunk inquires irresistibly.

Matt reads over the question and the rest of the mostly cheerful guy Hunk’s known since Pidge introduced them disintegrates immediately. He stares at Hunk with the eyes of something dead and seems to sink under an invisible weight.

“If I tell you, you can’t tell anyone. 'Specially not Katie.”

Hunk snags Matt’s pinky finger in his own and swears his silence with a tug.

Matt swallows and describes what happened in a voice that fractures like thin ice.

Hunk can’t suppress the shivers and clamps a hand over his mouth although he has nothing to say. The next breath Matt exhales is shaky, his face drawn and sickly pale.

“I’m glad Shiro doesn’t remember much of the arena,” he mumbles. “I don’t know if he’d be mad if he heard that, or offended, or what. But even as bad as it got for me, I believe it was worse in the arena. I really do.”

Vaqnak had talked about the arena fondly. She spoke of Shiro— no, Champion like he was her favorite underdog character on some kind of daytime tv competition. The arena was made to entertain people like her, people like Zarkon and Sendak. That tells Hunk all that he needs to know about it.

 _I hope it never comes back to him,_ Hunk writes.

There’s a beat of silence and Matt claps the side of the bottle, the empty sound echoing.

“So nobody swims in the pool?” he points up.

Hunk shakes his head and then scrawls. _Even if it wasn’t upside down, we’re usually too busy for pool parties._

“It can’t actually be upside down. The gravity in the room is skewed, or at least needs adjusting.”

_Wanna swim?_

“Want the pool to make sense.”

Hunk finds that pretty reasonable. There’s a lot of things he wants to make sense too.

_Lance would want to swim._

“He looks like a swimmer,” Matt says, smiling sheepishly. “Hope he won’t be mad at me for throwing him under the bus.”

 _No way_ , Hunk scrawls. _He loves that stupid game, he’ll be happy to take credit for some bonus round._

“Nonexistent secret level.”

Semantics. Hunk rolls his eyes. He lets his thoughts slip back to the horror that won’t settle, and purses his lips as he writes a dismal truth.

_I would’ve done the same thing. About your friend._

The smile fades and Matt lies back, covering his eyes with his arm.

“Damn. This isn’t really much of a celebration after all. Sorry, Hunk.”

Hunk squeezes his shoulder. It’s not like he felt much like celebrating anyway.

* * *

Shiro looks over the mess in Hunk’s room, expression neutral. It’s too late for Hunk to hide any of it, so he doesn’t bother trying.

“I’ll help you clean up,” he offers simply.

Hunk bites his lip.

“Less clutter in the room could be conductive to less clutter up here.” Shiro taps his temple.

Hunk uncaps a marker and drags it across his whiteboard.

_Maybe later._

“Whatever you decide.” Shiro steps over a broken shelf and sits on the floor next to him. “How are you holding up?”

What a stupid question. Knowing it comes from a good place doesn’t make it any easier to answer.

Hunk settles on a halfhearted shrug.

Shiro nods, slow, studying Hunk with barely concealed concern. “That’s okay. You don’t have to know how you feel about it. However you feel is okay, confusing or not. What isn’t okay is hurting yourself.”

Shiro glances down at Hunk’s swollen knuckles, wounds like little pink mouths glistening under freshly picked scabs.

 _Sorry,_ he writes, even though he’s not. It seems like the simplest response, and the simpler the response, the easier it is to get through conversation.

“That doesn’t look bad enough for a pod, but we could put some cream on it. It’d heal faster.”

Hunk just shrugs again. It doesn’t hurt that much and getting the cream means going to Coran. Coran is loud and talkative and while normally Hunk loves that about him, right now it’s yet another thing that’s a little too much.

Shiro’s shoulders slump and while it’s subtle, Hunk figures he’s probably frustrated.

“Okay,” Shiro murmurs, sounding more weary than anything. “Pidge says she saw you getting sick yesterday. Is it your anxiety?”

Hunk winces, then nods. In actuality he’d been succumbing to the worst hangover of his life, but it’s not something Shiro needs to know. He doesn’t exactly expect Matt to mention it, considering the places they ended up going in the grip of intoxication. Besides, Matt left. Another resistance ship picked him up and Hunk figures by the time he sees him again, there’s not going to be any point in revisiting those places.

“Do you need to take something for it? I’m sure we could find an equivalent somewhere. Or an antiemetic if the nausea’s really getting to you.”

_I think I’m all set._

“If you change your mind, let me know.”

Hunk flips the marker to the nub of the eraser on its end and clears the board.

“You agreed to assist in tomorrow’s mission. Is that still the plan?”

Hunk nods.

“No one is going to think less of you if you need a minute before jumping back into action. You know that, right?”

Hunk huffs an irritated sound and rapidly scrawls across the whiteboard.

_What, you don’t want me to come? Think I’ll screw up again?_

Shiro’s eyes widen. “No, of course not! Hunk, I’m just making sure you’re coming because you’re actually ready and not because you feel like you have to be.”

_Well, I am._

Shiro cocks his head and places his hand on Hunk’s shoulder.

“Is there anything you want to talk about?”

That’s another stupid question, he can’t talk at all! Yeah, he knows what Shiro means, and no, Hunk can’t exactly come up with better phrasing off the top of his head, but it still stings like a slap in the face. For a heartbeat he wants to throw the whiteboard across the room, or maybe even break it in half. It physically hurts to feel so helplessly pissed off and trapped by all the things he can’t change. And taking it out on inanimate objects only feels like release in the moment. After the fact, Hunk is just left with another mess he doesn’t have the strength to clean.

Hunk should probably kick Shiro out so he can decompress in peace and solitude. But Shiro is Shiro and if Hunk doesn’t give a little, then he’ll come right back later. He’s also trying to help. Shiro feels responsible for all of them and he doesn’t give up on anything.

 _I miss having meals with you guys,_ he writes tentatively.

“We miss that too,” Shiro murmurs.

 _Eating is messier now,_ Hunk explains, even though Shiro certainly already realizes that. _It’s embarrassing._

You don’t really realize how much your tongue moves the food around in your mouth until it can't. The chunk of it left in the back helps him not to choke, but he has to push the food with utensils to get it there, to actually accomplish proper chewing. The tongue that’s left does help, but it doesn’t have the range of motion to get it there by itself.

Sometimes he accidentally pushes the spork too far back and agitates his gag reflex. Sometimes he drops bits of food, like some old dog dribbling its kibble. It’s gross and unsightly.

“You don’t have to be embarrassed,” Shiro says. “You can do whatever you’re comfortable with, but know your team will never think less of you.”

They wouldn’t blame him, no, Hunk believes that. But he also believes Allura, poised, Princess Allura, at the least would be disgusted. At the least. Lance, as lax as he is, was also raised with rigid table manners. No one would dare gobble at his mama’s table and get away with it, that was for sure. And that’s just when they’re eating amongst themselves, half the time they’re sharing a table with resistance leaders and assorted intergalactic diplomats.

_Can you go now?_

Shiro frowns and Hunk thinks sees a trace of hurt in it.

“Need some space?”

Hunk bites his lip, nodding.

“You sure?”

Shiro, please. Hunk gives him a pained look.

“Okay,” Shiro agrees.

He pats Hunk’s shoulder and leaves.

* * *

“It’s a good thing you decided to pilot anyway,” Allura says, battle worn but grinning. “There was far more enemy fire than I expected.”

“You totally saved my butt,” Pidge raves. “Green couldn’t have taken a hit like that.”

“You were awesome!” Lance cheers, hopping on Hunk’s back like an enthusiastic spider monkey, arms dangling over his shoulders. “You literally body slammed a Galra battleship!”

“That was actually a little reckless,” Shiro admonishes, not unkindly.

Hunk pulls a holo-screen up from his gauntlet and spells with his finger in lieu of a stylus.

_I felt like I had to pull a Keith, since he’s not here and all._

Lance starts snickering and it earns an amused hum from Shiro.

“You all did wonderfully,” Allura says, pride radiating like a sunbeam. “Should we reward ourselves with a stroll through the Prismatic Mists?”

“Count me in,” Lance chirps.

He’s too loud, so Hunk gives him a warning nudge with his elbow. Lance mutters a noise of complaint, but hops down from his back anyway.  
  
“Me too,” Pidge agrees. “They look really interesting.”

“I’ll tag along.” Shiro looks to Hunk, somewhat warily. “You coming?”

Hunk shakes his head.

“What?” Lance frowns. “Why not?”

Because it’s going to be crowded and Hunk doesn’t have the patience for a crowd. Because no matter how good his friends think he did today, he doesn’t actually feel good at all. Because it’s going to be fun for them and he doesn’t want to spoil that by being a downer.

 _There’s some other stuff I want to do,_ he writes, shrugging.

Lance and Pidge exchange looks. Shiro is unsurprised, but the wariness remains in his expression. Allura’s beaming dims, but none of them try to argue.

“Very well,” Allura says. “I’ll see if Coran wants to join us. Hunk, if you change your mind, you have a map.”

Hunk nods and squirrels away in the opposite direction before anybody else can say anything. He shuts himself up in Keith’s room and strips his armor. He wishes he wanted to go. He wishes he could enjoy the Prismatic Mists. But it seems more like a chore than a reward and it’s awfully easier to bond with an empty room.

It’s been a few weeks since Hunk woke up mutilated. Almost a month, he believes, although he can never be certain.

Is a month enough time to get over it?

He’s getting used to not being able to speak. He’s getting used to taking hormone capsules with the first thing he eats in the morning, usually food goo. Goo and smoothies are the easiest foods, and he’s getting used to that too. He’s getting used to his blind side, even though he still gets nervous when his friends (accidentally) sneak up on it.

Is getting used to it the same as getting over it?

Should he feel better by now?

Is mourning supposed to feel like stagnation?

Maybe he was doing better after it first happened, when he packed everything he felt into smashing, cooking, and endless punching. Maybe he’s going backwards…and he should probably be more concerned about it than he actually is. But rather than add another problem to the lengthy list of everything else he has to grapple with, ignoring it, or at the very least pretending to, lightens the load on his shoulders.

* * *

Some missions go better than others, and this has been a truth since the beginning. Hunk had to choke on it watching Shay get dragged through dirt and dust on his first trip to the Balmera, where he couldn’t do anything but leave her to deal. It is a truth that has not waned and even as Voltron’s influence grows and their experience deepens, victories are never guaranteed.

Some missions end with well earned celebrations.

Some end only scarcely won, ensuing healing pod trips and shaky comedowns.

Some are lost altogether and if the cost is high enough, it can leave Hunk questioning whether intention has any merit at all. No one ever means to get civilians caught in the crossfire. No one ever means to make allies promises they can’t keep. Hunk’s own team, for instance, did not mean to leave him in the clutches of a heartless sadist. Whether they meant to or not, it happened.

So when Allura stands before hundreds on a platform, dressed in pink with a pair of stoic ambassadors behind her, Hunk squirms in his shoes. She can lament about nobility and loss, encourage everyone to bounce back to fight for the fallen, but those good intentions will inevitably lead to more death some way or another. Today is a hard day.

He’s been having a lot of hard days lately, but this one and the pile of bodies behind it knocks the breath from his lungs. The failure is fresh and burning like cinders beneath the skin. They were overpowered trying to retake Kythra and Hunk has this hideous thought that maybe it’s better Matt’s friend wasn’t here to see just how many of her people ended up vainly bloodied and trampled for a liberation that didn’t come.

A liberation Voltron failed to bring them. Hunk is not exempt from the blame.

“You look like you want to get out of here as much as I do.”

Hunk glances to the owner of the voice, this rebel Unilu woman who actually might be more of a girl. She can’t be much older than he is, lime green skin and dusky blue hair. The upper arm on the left side of her body stops above the elbow.

Hunk nods in vehement agreement. It makes him sick listening to all this. Pep talks don’t do anything to revive the dead.

“Then let’s go.” She holds out one of her hands.

Hunk glances at it, mouth opening in soundless surprise. He’s seen her around before, this rebel, he helped repair a ship in her unit. Seeing her around isn’t the same as knowing her though, and he doesn’t even know her name. They were never properly introduced.  
  
But the day has defeated him and whether he knows her or not, she’s the only one in this suffocating crowd offering a way out. Hunk takes her hand. She pulls him through the throng, outside the auditorium and into the night air. It smells like frost and two moons in different phases bathe the land in silver.

“Easier to breathe out here, huh?” she says, eyes sliding to Hunk as she lets go of his hand.

Hunk nods wearily.

She stuffs her lower set of hands in her pockets and toes at some pebbles on the ground as she studies him. Hunk raises a brow, feeling almost like he’s being scrutinized.

“You look different in person,” she says, blinking.

Hunk tilts his head.

“Not much of a talker, are ya?” she returns, tilting hers the opposite way.

Hunk gives in and accesses the newly implemented communication features on his gauntlet.

 _“I can’t,”_ he explains to her in a voice that is not his, a generic, androgynous monotone.

“Oh,” she gasps softly. “Sorry.”

He waves his hand. It’s not a big deal. Well, it is, but her mistake wasn't.

“You could talk on the Voltron Show,” she says tentatively. “Was that real or not?”

Hunk snorts, taps into his gauntlet with a bit of a venom.

_“If I were going to rank the worst things that ever happened to me, losing my tongue would be first and the Voltron Show would be the second.”_

The rebel tosses her head back with a laugh and Hunk notices that some of her teeth are chipped.

“Are you kidding? I loved that show! You were my favorite, too. Always made me laugh.”

All Hunk can do is shake his head, cheeks toasting with the residual embarrassment.

“Hey, that’s real praise coming from me,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I didn’t think too highly of you Voltron guys at first. Getting all the credit for things the resistance has been trying to do for ages. I thought you were always safe too, flying around in ultra huge, legendary Lion ships while all we have is our flimsy fighters.”

“Guess I was wrong about that much,” she adds, somewhat apologetically, staring at where his headband covers the socket his eye no longer occupies.

Hunk isn’t offended. At least she’s honest. He hates when people try to bullshit him. He’d rather have prickly honesty than honey-sweet deceit.

 _“What’s your name?”_ he asks, or rather his communicator does, upon the bidding of his fingers.

He hates using it, really, but no matter what his personal feelings are, it is a convenient and necessary upgrade.

“Faeteri,” she says, shoulders rolling lazily. “So, Yellow Paladin, Hunk’s gotta be your stage name, right?”

He shakes his head.

Faeteri’s eyes widen. “That’s your real name?”

Hunk nods.

“What even, I thought it had to be apart of your routine!” she has a nervous giggling fit and runs her only upper hand through her hair. “Okay, so that word actually means something kinda dirty where I come from. You mind if I call you Y.P. instead?”

As if the Voltron Show hadn’t been embarrassing enough, Hunk now has to live with the knowledge that his name is probably some kind of slang for something sexual or gross in Unilu language. That’s just dandy, eh?

He shrugs in the response to her question. He can live with Y.P.

“Okay, Y.P.” Faeteri starts walking backwards, steps slow. “I’m pretty messed up about today, to tell you the truth. You mind if I take the edge off?”

Hunk pauses, blinking. He thinks back to drinking with Matt (Matt, who is currently being babysat by his sister in the castle lounge because of how unconsolable he is) and figures she’s about to whip out a flask or nunvil or something. He doesn’t care. He’s not here to tell her what to do and he’s feeling pretty dang messed up too.

He shakes his head.

“Thanks.” Her grin is crooked as she unsnaps a pocket and digs inside. “I would’ve done it anyway, but it’s good to know you’re not gonna stare at me all judgmental and stuff. Everybody’s gotta have something, ya know?”

To his surprise, it’s a little baggie of pills Faeteri pulls out. About a handful of tiny, red round pills. She pops one in her mouth and swallows dry. Hunk just watches, mildly stunned.

What are those?

“You want one?” she asks lightly.

No. No, he has no idea what that is, but his mother would never—

His mother isn’t here. His friends aren’t here. It’s just Hunk and this girl, and those pills.

Temptation slithers through his stomach.

Because he’s so fucking tired of feeling like trash. Because today, his hand in a failure to fight off the Empire meant death and waste and ruin. Because he wants to feel anything other than the way he feels right now and her offer was so casual, so gentle, so it must not be anything that bad, right?

He’s in space. It could be the space equivalent of offering someone peanuts on an airplane, right?

(But he knows that’s not an excuse, not true, he’s rationalizing. Peanuts don’t take the edge off.)

Hunk finds himself nodding and holds out his hand.

“Ah, ah,” Faeteri chimes, shaking the bag out of reach. “I don’t know how much you know about my people, but I’m a traditional kind of girl. You want some, you gotta trade something else.”

Hunk holds his hands up, palms empty, and shakes his head. He doesn’t have anything to trade. He feeds a pin of relief even in the disappointment. Whatever that is, he probably shouldn’t take it, no matter how he feels.

“I’d take a kiss,” she says, smiling. “Who doesn’t want a kiss from a famous, legendary defender?”

Sometimes Hunk forgets he’s famous. He scoffs and nods along anyway.

Fine, whatever. A kiss for some kind of high. Maybe he’ll regret it later, but it’s just this one time anyway. If he can take a break from feeling like shit for five minutes, why not give himself that?

That can’t be too much to ask.

Faeteri takes out another pill and places it gently on her tongue, doesn’t swallow. She closes the gap between them and smothers her lips over his, shoving her tongue into his mouth. Hunk feels the deposit of the pill at the back of his throat and it’s all he feels, really. He isn’t sure if it’s the castration or the depression, or some kind of crappy combination of both, but he doesn’t really get anything out of the kiss. He isn’t repulsed by it, but he doesn’t enjoy it. Not like he enjoyed the experimental ones with the girls at the Garrison, or even making out with Lance during that spin the bottle round.

Faeteri’s lips leave his, a thin tendril of drool snapping between them. Her breathy exhale drifts over his mouth. She steps back, a glimmer in her eyes that wasn’t there before.

“This stuff hits fast,” she murmurs. “Let’s go up the hill.”

She flaps a couple hands at the rising crest of land and leads the way. Hunk follows, waiting to feel something. Maybe it’s better if he doesn’t. What kind of person takes pills from random aliens they don’t know?

Halfway up the hill, it hits and Hunk is too caught up in it to scold himself any further. It starts as a warm glow he feels under the skin. Like liquid gold running through his veins, like sunbathing on the inside.

Oh.

Oh, it’s _so_ nice.

Hunk closes his eye and follows Faeteri the rest of the way up by sound alone. Suddenly her foot steps are so melodic they’re almost music notes. Fleet and graceful, the grass seeming to part around them.

Once they’re atop the hill he cracks his eye open just in time to watch Faeteri fall back to the cushion of the grass, sighing softly. She laughs as looks up at Hunk, the silver of the star shine dancing over her features.

“What are you doing?”

Hunk hears the question but it comes across so odd, he’s not sure how to answer. It doesn’t sound like a real question, actually. It seems to make less and less sense the more it repeats in his head, and Faeteri doesn’t seem to care about the answer anyway.

She laughs up at him again, star shine sparkling over her like a glaze. She’s crying too, tears traveling down her cheeks in shimmery canals. She rolls over onto her belly and starts rubbing her face and hands along the grass. Even the stump of her missing arm moves back and fourth, like it possesses some invisible hand that’s also petting the grass.

“This feels amazing,” she says, muffled by the ground.

Hunk wants to experience it for himself. He drops to his knees and bows forward like he’s doing yoga, forehead kissing the grass. The thin, silver blades are soft as baby bunnies and for a moment, Hunk even worries he could hurt them. He lifts his head to ascertain it’s only grass beneath him and then immediately goes back to rubbing his face in it.

The grass whispers over his skin, so fuzzy his face isn’t enough. Hunk uprights, kneeling and shucking his armor off. Once he’s down to the thinner layer of suit, he flops forward and fans his limbs like a starfish, nuzzling his entire body into the mesmerizing carpet of grass.

Hunk feels connected to every single grass blade, every tiny root, every microscopic organism feeding the dirt. It’s like he’s unlocked a piece of his soul he never knew existed and now he can be one with everything in the universe. He thinks back to Keith having his mind blown simply by the realization everything was birthed from the particles of cosmic dust but now, now Hunk thinks he truly understands it.

The grass has thoughts. They don’t think in words like Hunk does, but they do think. Their thoughts are temperatures and vibrations, and Hunk can feel every one of them tingle down to his fingertips. The glow inside him brightens with the frisson of this newfound telepathy.

Faeteri sits up across from him and starts patting his back, babbling enthusiastically about all sorts of things. Hunk grins into the grass, letting her excitement wash through him.

He can’t remember the last time he felt this good.

.  
.  
.

Eventually Lance stumbles across them, on the opposite side of the hill they decided to roll down at some point. Hunk offers a friendly wave, but Lance seems on edge for some reason.

“Where have you been?”

Just here. Hunk gestures openly to convey as much. Faeteri snickers and pushes her face into his bicep. They’re laying kind of close and while Hunk normally isn’t cuddly with virtual strangers, he isn’t normally on this wavelength either. He feels connected to her, to everyone and everything there is. He can feel her heartbeat as well as he can feel his own, and her breaths intertwine with the melody of night.

Lance glances to her and raises a brow. “Well, we gotta go. Allura finished her speech over a varga ago and— Dude! It’s freezing out here, where’s your armor?”

Hunk doesn’t need it. The inner glow he feels is warm enough to But he can’t explain that to Lance without the communicator. He nudges Faeteri, hoping she can help him out with this. Surely she knows what he wants to say. She’s just as interwoven into the glow as he is.

“Oh, yeah. He left it all up there.” She throws back an arm, indicating the top of the hill.

Lance squints at her uncertainly, then shifts his gaze to Hunk.

“Been drinking?”

No, he’s been enlightened. But that’s another thing that’s too difficult to explain without the communicator and with a mostly useless remainder of tongue that doesn’t do anything to contribute to intelligible speech.

But for the first time since it happened, Hunk genuinely doesn’t mind. He isn’t embarrassed or frustrated. He’s in tune with Lance’s breath and if it takes a couple tries to get through, it’s okay. His connection with all that there is runs deeper than anything verbal. Hunk reaches for Lance and grabs his hand, giving an insistent tug.

“Whoa, hey— Wanna warn me next time?”

Hunk hums in his throat and just rubs his thumb over the back of his friend’s hand. The fabric of his glove is so pleasant. The little ripples in the dense material could almost hug the callouses off Hunk’s thumb.

“Uh…Hunk?”

Faeteri just laughs beside him, the sound of gentle rains. She keeps rubbing her own set of hands over the grass, stirring up their thoughts with every brush of skin over blades.

“Holy crow, you’re high!” Lance gasps, yanking his hand out of Hunk’s grasp. He turns on a suspicious glower on Faeteri. “What the heck did you give him?”

Hunk pouts, reaching for Lance’s hand again. The material likes being touched. It too, has thoughts.

“Red popper,” she answers, grinning lopsidedly. “You want one?”

“No, we gotta go.” Lance sighs and hauls Hunk up to his feet, a movement Hunk automatically follows.  
  
“Do you need help getting back to your ship?” Lance asks Faeteri, voice worn and wary.

Hunk can feel the tension in his shoulders. He thinks Lance would benefit from a little high, too bad they have to leave already.

“I’m comfy right here,” she murmurs, sprawling her limbs wider on the grass. She moves them like a kid making a snow angel, sliver light like phantoms playing on her physique.

“Alright, you have fun with that. Come on, Hunk, let’s get your armor…”

Hunk waves goodbye to his new friend and follows his old one up the hill. Lance helps him put everything on and he doesn’t say too much, but his unease bleeds out like an aura.

“Are you okay?” he asks when Hunk is fully clad in everything save for the helmet he instead snaps to his belt.

Hunk is better than okay. He should be asking Lance that. Then he remembers he can and does so, tapping into his gauntlet and truly appreciating for the first time the way the holographic keypad blinks under his touch.

“Not really,” Lance says, dragging a hand through his hair. “Do you even know what you took? Cause I sure don’t.”

_“She just said.”_

“Right, like I’m supposed to know exactly what ‘red popper’ means.”

 _“Nothing bad,”_ Hunk promises. _“It feels great.”_

“But how do you— You know what, never mind. Let’s just go.”

Hunk leaves with him but he doesn’t let Lance’s skepticism put a damper on his internal helical glow.

* * *

The next day is like being hungover. His nausea isn’t as bad as it was the morning after drinking with Matt, but he’s immensely thirsty. He gulps down about ten water packets within his first hour of being up and kicks the clutter aside to make a clear path from the door to his bed. Lance brought him to his own room last night. Lance naturally doesn’t know anything about Hunk’s staying in Keith’s room. In any case, last night Hunk hadn’t minded the clutter. It seemed beautiful to him, like a masterpiece of a collage and not just a heap of crap gathering dust because he still can’t find the motivation to clean.

Lance doesn’t mention the clutter, but he follows Hunk like a particularly clingy shadow.

“Can I get you anything?” he asks.

Hunk shakes his head and flops back to the mattress.

“So we’re not gonna talk about it?” he asks next.

Hunk dismissively flaps his hand. He doesn’t particularly care if they talk about it or not. It helped soothe yesterday’s pain and he doesn’t regret it.

“It was pretty hard to get you in here without anybody noticing you were stoned,” Lance says, folding his arms. “And it kinda freaks me out that you petted your pillowcase for like an hour.”

Okay, so in hindsight that part was pretty weird. All of it was pretty weird actually, but like, not in a bad way. Hunk’s pillow had never felt softer. He felt a deep connection with each and every fiber of material and it was amazing, no matter if it was real or not.

“Are you even listening to me?”

Hunk internally groans and reaches for the whiteboard on the other side of the mattress, scrawling impatiently.

_Think you could go crawl up someone else’s ass for five minutes?_

But the thing about writing is that it takes longer thank speaking. When you’re telling someone something verbally, it can come out wrong or maybe you stutter. Maybe you say something you regret because your mouth is running faster than your head and you can’t stop yourself in time. But when you’re writing, you have an extra moment to reflect.

So Hunk brushes his initial scrawl off with his hand and edits to soften the blow. Lance isn’t being irritating on purpose and it’s not fair to treat him like he is.

 _Give me a break, my head is killing me,_ he writes instead and then showcases to his friend.

“Yesterday sucked for everybody,” Lance says. “You didn’t have to go off and take mystery dope with some random rebel.”

Hunk shrugs passively.

“Or you at least could’ve told someone you were leaving,” Lance sighs and his voice gets smaller. “It took awhile to find you.”

Hunk rolls his eyes.

 _I’m a grown man,_ he scrawls pointedly.

He’s pretty sure he is, anyway. He was on the cusp of it when they left and they’ve been in space for awhile now. Even if he’s not quite grown yet, he can’t have all that much of it left to do. He certainly doesn’t need babysitting from anyone, let alone Lance.

“I know, it’s just…” Lance chews his lip and sits on the edge of the bed. “Ever since what happened, it bothers me when I don’t know where you are. It makes me feel like you could get hurt again.”

Hunk swallows, ire abating. He rubs Lance’s back gently, hoping to console him. He hates that Lance saw the torture footage, hates that Pidge saw it too. Hates it for himself because it makes him feel even more exposed. Hates it for them because it’s yet another horrible thing in this horrible war that can’t be unseen, and when they look at him, they’re always going to get glimpses of it.

“I know you’ve been having a hard time since then,” Lance goes on quietly. “I still don’t know what to do. I get that you need your space sometimes, I really do, but it feels like you just shut down whenever any of us try to reach out.”

Hunk draws his hand back and takes a moment to absorb what he’s being told.

“You never used to be like that,” Lance tentatively continues. “You always used to come forward when something was bothering you. You were never the type to bite your tongue—“

Upon realizing what he’s just said, Lance immediately breaks off. His eyes widen in silent panic and he clamps his hand over his mouth.

“I can’t believe I just said that,” he gasps when he finally pulls his hand away. “I’m sorry, Hunk, I didn’t mean for it to come out like that at all.”

And Hunk understands. It’s a figure of speech. And when you use speech and you don’t have to write or type, or otherwise, that’s the thing that happens. You blurt stuff out without thinking. But just because he understands doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt. It hurts like a wound ripped raw all over again and Hunk lies back down, turning to face the wall with no other attempt at response. That alone should be enough.

“I’m so sorry,” Lance apologizes again. It rings like a broken plea.

Hunk just closes his eye and waits for Lance to leave.

Lance finally takes the hint, his weight lifting from the mattress. Hunk listens to his steps drag as he plods to the door and it closes behind him with a relieving whoosh.

.  
.  
.

 

“Hunk?” Pidge pokes her head in, then an elbow. “Do you want dinner?”

Hunk declines with a wave.

“Not even a little?” she frowns, concerned.

Hunk shakes his head.

Pidge squints at him and then worms her whole body in, frown deepening as she approaches the bed.

“No offense, but you don’t look so hot. Are you sure it’s just a headache?”

Hunk blindly feels around for the marker and fishes it from a fold in the blanket. He pushes it to the whiteboard and scribes tiredly.

_It’s a bad one._

“Migraine?” she asks, voice lowering an octave.

_Borderline._

And while he is trying to pacify her to get her to leave, this is not a lie. This hangover, or side effect, or whatever it is, manifested a mildly skull-crushing headache. He feels like he got the crap kicked out of him and he lost count of all the water packets he’s drained.

“Ouch,” she murmurs, wincing sympathetically.

She still isn’t going away, so Hunk steers the conversation.

_How’s Matt?_

“Um, okay, I think.” She nibbles at her thumbnail. “Shiro talked to him for awhile. He’s going to stay on the castle tonight.”

_That make you feel better?_

Pidge nods. “How about you? Other than your head, you doing okay?”

Nodding is the path of least resistance.

“Lance seems pretty shook up. Even Coran couldn’t get him to smile.”

Hunk pauses. She’s still referring to Kythra, isn’t she? She has to be. Lance would’ve told him if he mentioned Hunk’s somewhat irresponsible adventure in altered brain chemistry to any of the others.

 _We’ll take care of him,_ Hunk writes neutrally.

“I hope so.” She breaks eye contact, glancing around the mess. “You know, I could program a bot to clean for you.”

 _Your room looks way worse,_ Hunk scrawls, glowering.

“I didn't mean it like that. I'm just trying to help,” she mumbles glumly.

_Then leave me alone. Let me sleep this off._

Pidge reads and awkwardly plays with the collar of her shirt.

“Can I stay if I’m quiet? I’ll just sit on the floor with my laptop, you won’t even know I’m here. Or I can help, like if you change your mind about din—“

Hunk holds a hand up to stop her and rapidly moves the marker across the board.

_Not today. Sorry._

Pidge’s lower lip wobbles almost imperceptibly. Hunk can sense an effort not to look as stung as she actually is and feels guilty for it. Not guilty enough to change his mind, however.

“Alright.”

* * *

“Number Two.” Coran gives him a friendly clap on the shoulder. “I have a mind to reward everyone for a job well done. They all seemed to like that dessert with the zorberry drizzle. Help me whip up a batch?”

Hunk shrugs Coran’s hand off and opens the communication bracelet he has when back in normal clothes.

_“Sorry. I don’t remember the recipe.”_

Coran frowns skeptically but before he can he pressed, Hunk makes a break for the exit.

* * *

“Could you escort me to the mall, Hunk?” Allura asks, gloss on her smiling lips. “You’re rather popular in the food court, aren’t you? My currency is a bit outdated, so I was hoping you might be able to get us some coupons.”

Hunk knows what she’s trying to do and he wants to be receptive, but what he wants and what reality is, are very different.

_“Ask Pidge. The Terra vendor likes her and I think she wanted a new game cartridge anyway.”_

“Oh…” Allura trails off, but she’s got this look on her face that means she’s preparing a rebuttal.

Before she can fire it at him, Hunk slips his headphones on and slinks off down the hall.

* * *

“Huuuunk. I’m trying to decode the virus that made the shields go all screwy and it’s taking forever.” Pidge dramatically flops back in her chair. “Your eyes are fresher. Look at it, tell me what I’m missing.”

_“Isn’t Matt here? Your brother’s better with algorithms, I’ll go find him.”_

Hunk hefts to his feet and scurries away. He doesn’t actually search for for Matt or anyone else, he just slips off to a lesser used platform on the castle and lets himself crash in the silence.

* * *

“The Vogirk’s have a really nice beach,” Lance begins, forcing a smile. “We should live it up while we’ve got the chance. You can’t tell me you don’t miss body surfing.”

Hunk chews his lip. He misses a lot of things, honestly.

“C’mon, buddy.” Lance gently nudges him. “It’ll be fun. And you can just like, chill in the sun if you’re not up to swimming. Sun is good for you. A little bit is, anyway.”

 _“Not today,”_ Hunk types, trying to ignore the crushed expression that twists Lance’s face. _“I’m gonna go wax my Lion.”_

They both know it’s not true and when Hunk leaves, it’s in the direction opposite to Yellow’s hanger.

* * *

Shiro corners him at night in Keith’s quarters, leaving Hunk agape.

“You’ve been sleeping in here, right?”

Hunk takes the honest route and nods.

“It’s okay. I doubt Keith would care, though I am curious as to why.”

Hunk took off the bracelet when he put his night clothes on. He grabs his whiteboard instead and economizes his use of words, because it seems that the marker is drying out.

_More space._

“You don’t mean capacity,” Shiro says quietly. “You mean space from us.”

Hunk doesn’t know how to reply. He doesn’t want to hurt Shiro. He doesn’t want to hurt any of his friends. Nonetheless, that is one of the reasons he hasn’t left Keith’s room. No one would think to look for him here and lately, he just doesn’t want to be found.

Shiro’s hand covers his. “This is why I want to talk. What happened to you was traumatic, physically and emotionally. To deal with it, is a lot, believe me I know. Sometimes it’s too much, right?”

Hunk doesn’t like where this is going.

 _Can we talk tomorrow?_ he writes.

“I don’t think it can wait any longer than it already has,” Shiro says, giving his hand a gentle pat. “You’re withdrawing more and more.”

Hunk pulls his hand out of Shiro’s grasp, making a gruff, frustrated sound.

 _That’s not fair,_ he scrawls. _I go on every mission you do. Even though Allura gave me the option, I chose to keep piloting. I haven’t slacked off as a paladin._

“No, you haven’t, and I’m not accusing you. I’m worried about you,” Shiro stresses. “It’s normal to have a hard time adapting to major life changes. But it’s not normal to avoid everything, and once the missions are over, that’s exactly what you do.”

Hunk gives him a hard stare.

_So what? I do my job, that’s the important part._

It takes everything he has, everything he can scrap together inside himself and push forth for the cause that mutilated him in the first place. After the battles, Hunk simply doesn’t have anything left to give. Not anymore.

“You’re much more than your role in Voltron, Hunk, and you know I can relate to what you’re going through.”

Can he?

Shiro has gone through the worst of the worst, but Shiro has a backbone of titanium. Yeah, he’s suffered Hell. He’s lost an arm, his flesh is blotched and broken, ruined by overlapping maps of scarring. Sometimes his flashbacks stop him dead in his tracks and nightmares haunt him like vengeful ghosts. Maybe the real ghosts are out for him too. There is no doubt in Hunk’s mind that Shiro killed in the arena. Shiro is a great leader because necessities, even the dark ones, come naturally to him.

Hunk isn’t anything like Shiro. Shiro is made from stronger stuff than he is. Hunk may have big muscles on the outside, but on the inside he’s built like a slug. Uncertainty makes him sick and risk makes him pause. He’s ill-suited to being a paladin, but he does it because it’s the right thing to do. Obligation doesn’t make him a hero, not the kind Shiro is.

“Are you familiar with adjustment disorders?” Shiro asks next, tone gentled precisely because Hunk is an undeniably delicate creature.

And while Hunk genuinely respects him, at this he snorts.

_Doesn’t matter._

“Of course it matters.” Shiro’s mouth forms a firm line.

Hunk shakes the marker in an attempt to revitalize the fading ink and carries on.

_Let’s say I have one. What happens next, you send me to space therapy? Probably should’ve done that for your PTSD a long time ago._

“We’re not talking about me,” Shiro says cooly, a warning edge to his voice.

Hunk grunts as annoyance smothers him like a prickly, uncomfortable sweater. Shiro’s got no right to be this hypocritical. He can’t stand there and pretend there’s something he can actually do about Hunk, while his own condition remains ignored.

_Just because you want to help, doesn’t mean you can. Maybe when you guys get that through your heads, it won’t be so hard to be around you._

A flash of hurt crosses Shiro’s face, but he remains composed.

“It’s not up to us to be mind readers, Hunk. If we’re putting too much pressure on you, or making you uncomfortable, you need to tell us. Isolating yourself all the time doesn’t fix anything. It’s only going to create complications in the long run.”

Does Shiro not realize Hunk hates being like this?

He doesn’t enjoy avoiding his friends. He doesn’t want to get as disproportionately aggravated as he does when they say something insensitive or when their well meant attempts to cheer him up backfire. He wants to be able to relax around them and fall into an easy camaraderie just like he used to.

But things are never going to be the way they used to be and it’s too much to act like they can be. It’s too painful to confront that and being around his friends puts him in the position where he has no choice.

Maintaining his duties as a paladin is a must, but everything else is excess. Interacting with the people he cares about feels like a too difficult balancing act once he’s devoted all his mental energy to what’s required of him. Tuning them out is infinitely easier and it is horrible that he feels that way. It is not the way he wants to feel.

It’s also the truth.

‘Lay off,’ Hunk wants to write. ‘I’m not like this because I want to be.’

But he only gets as far as the _La_ before the marker announces its dried out death in a failure to produce another smear of ink. Both his suit and his bracelet are in his room. Hunk feels a brief but powerful rush of rage toward the marker that makes him want to snap it like a twig.

It passes right through him and he just lets it drop from limp fingers, watching the useless thing roll across the floor.

Shiro stares at him intently, studying. It makes Hunk feel like a bug under a microscope, but it’s pointless to protest when he has no way of communicating the comparison. He’s also tired in the emotional kind of way. Arguing with Shiro has already drained him, he feels like a drowning man fighting a riptide and even if he had the means to argue some more, he’d probably just be swept under anyway.

This doesn’t mean he concedes to the investigation of whatever adjustment disorder he most likely has. This doesn’t mean he concedes to the threat of hanging out with his friends. It simply means that Hunk needs to get better at hiding, to avoid these confrontations and arguments in the first place.

Shiro can’t tell him what to do if he can’t find him.

“We can pick this up later,” he says eventually, the intensity in his stare diminishing.

Hunk motions halfheartedly toward the door.

Shiro silently excuses himself.

* * *

Hunk has an idea. It is an idea that he is initially opposed to, but it won’t leave him alone. It seems so appealing even thought he doesn’t want it to be, but the sad fact of it is, lately all the things he doesn’t want are the things that inexorably are. He is worn down by the persistence of this idea just like he’s worn down by everything else and he gives in because inevitably, he has no resistance in him. He always feels like shit and the last time he didn’t feel like shit was rolling around in grass he thought was sending him telepathic messages.

It’s so stupid. It’s stupid but stupid takes less effort than futile attempts to force himself to be the inverse of what he currently is; detached, disinterested, supremely done.

He gets Faeteri’s transponder code out of an encrypted rebel database and takes off on the Yellow Lion when everyone else is asleep. He follows it to an asteroid belt he’d been vaguely aware, despite not having made a trip.

The asteroid he lands his Lion on isn’t a particularly militarized place. It’s more like a ramshackle city with vendors and trading posts, and small housing units shaped like coconuts. He finds her in what is obviously a bar, various aliens drinking and socializing. Some of them have rebel uniforms, many appear to be civilian or otherwise.

“Hey, Y.P.,” she greets as he shuffles up to her stool. “Never thought I’d see you here.”

Hunk lifts his hand in a wave.

“Unless you’re not really here.” Faeteri squints at him uncertainly and it doesn’t seem like she’s joking around.

She’s already high, Hunk realizes after a moment.

 _“I’m really here.”_ He taps into his bracelet, claiming the stool next to hers.

He opted to come in his casual wear, figuring it would be less conspicuous than paladin armor.

“Oh, good. Always nice to see a friendly face.” She rests her chin in her hand. “Can I get you a drink?”

 _“I’d rather have another pill.”_ He admits, straight to the point.

Faeteri raises a brow and pauses to take a sip from the green liquid in the glass bubbling on the table.

“I have a couple left,” she says. “What’ve you got to trade?”

Hunk moves in to kiss her and she puts a finger to his lips.

“Not so fast,” she titters. “Sorry, Y.P. You’re cute and a kiss cut it the first time, but I’m gonna need something tangible for our next transaction.”

Hunk shifts back in his stool, disappointed. He feels silly for assuming she’d just accept another smooch and frustrated with himself for not thinking ahead. He came all the way out here for nothing.

_“I don’t have anything.”_

The look she gives him is pitying. She takes another sip of her drink.

“Think you could take that guy?” she asks as she sets it back on the counter, the lower arm on her left pointing surreptitiously back at this broad alien seated at a table.

He’s built like an ox but not too much taller than Hunk. Pale gray skin and a lipless mouth. When he laughs with his friends, Hunk can see he’s got rows of teeth. His ears are webbed and a narrow, tufted tail peeks out from beneath his cloak.

Hunk looks back to Faeteri, puzzled.

_“Why would I? I didn’t come here to fight anyone.”_

“Hang on a sec,” she says. “Watch the way he treats the server.”

The server, another Unilu girl in a work shirt and shorts, stops at his table with another drink. As she sets it down, his tail swings over and he draws that tuft up her bare leg. The girl lets out a startled squeak and hurries along to the next table, nearly spilling the other drinks on her tray while he just laughs behind her.

Hunk narrows his eyes, disgusted.

“Yep,” Faeteri huffs beside him. “That’s Kagnar. Gets away with being a bastard because he’s got a load of GAC. Guess how he makes it.”

Hunk looks back to Faeteri, brow raised.

“Fighting yuppers,” she says darkly. “He breeds a bunch, starves them till they’re desperate and sics them on each other. Other assholes pay to watch and make bets.”

Hunk seethes, hands balling into fists. Thankfully, he doesn’t need the bracelet for Faeteri to get this.

“Believe me, it pisses me off too. I’ve got a strong stomach, but I don’t do cruelness, Y.P. I’ve got it out for the guy, I just can't take him. I’m a sharpshooter not a wrestler. He’d break me in half. But you could totally take Kagnar,” Faeteri insists. “You’re a Voltron Paladin. And if wipe the floor with him, you might as well keep his GAC pouch as a trophy. And if you do that, well,” she lowers her voice. “I could introduce you to a friend of mine not to far from here, who’s got exactly what you’re looking for and then some.”

Oh.

No, he couldn’t do that. That’s just not right. Hunk is a defender, he doesn’t throw his weight around to get what he wants. That’s not the kind of person he is, he fights because he has to. He fights to protect, he doesn’t beat people up so he can rob them. Even if this guy in question is undoubtedly an awful being, how much better would Hunk be if he did something like that?

That server weaves past Kagnar’s table. She’s trying to hurry but she doesn’t escape the slap of that tail tuft on her behind, and a bright green flush of embarrassment scorches her face.

Hunk’s train of thought stalls. He blanks. One moment he’s in his stool, the next he’s at Kagnar’s table. He rips the quiznaker out of his chair, throwing him to the solid dirt floor. Disoriented, Ragnar’s head swivels back, claws scrabbling for purchase. Hunk picks the chair up and cracks it down on his back before he can attempt a stand, operating purely on impulse.

No one tries to stop him. Not even the person seated on the other side of the table. Hunk lets all of his internal strife fly into his hands, cracking the chair down again and again with all the force he possesses. Kagnar’s perverted little tail audibly snaps and bends at an awkward angle, the tuft twitching spastically.

His eyes grow wide, fixing upon Hunk in incomprehensible shock. His mouth is open, jaw askew. Another few hits and it too breaks, shifting downward and oozing blood. A few of his teeth fall into the fanning puddle. Hunk makes out some meaty roots clinging onto them and the chair suddenly stills in his hands.

He drops it and it clatters loudly to the floor. The rest of the bar is in a hush, other patrons openly gaping at him. Except for Faeteri. She hops off her stool and scrambles to Hunk’s side, bending over Kagnar's prone form. She pushes back the cloak and deftly unties a fat pouch from his belt.

“Got it, let's go.” She urgently pulls Hunk toward the exit.

Hunk follows numbly, staring at the bloodied face of the stranger he just beat into the floor. Kagnar is too winded to pursue, but he dizzily pushes himself onto his knees. He cries out after them, or tries to anyway, but his busted jaw renders his curses unintelligible. Hunk knows what that feels like, and he feels a twinge of satisfaction to have inflicted such a struggle on someone so reprehensible.

“He never even saw you coming,” Faeteri gushes as she pulls him along. “I didn’t expect you to unleash it on him just like that!”

Hunk didn’t expect it either. He was thinking he wasn’t going to do it at all, and then the anger just boiled over.

She leads him behind the bar and around the block, chattering the whole time.

“Don’t feel bad about it, Y.P. You did everybody a favor, I’ve met nicer Galra soldiers. Why do you think nobody stepped in?”

Hunk doesn’t know how he feels about it, really. It happened so fast. It’s the first time he’s bodily attacked anyone in quite some time. With his bayard, he’s generally a long-range fighter. He isn’t shy or stunted when it comes to close quarters, and fighting is what he does most of the time these days, no matter what he’s doing it with.

It’s the first time he’s ever robbed anyone, asshole or not, but technically it was Faeteri who did the stealing on his behalf. Faeteri takes him to this tent and pushes up the entrance flap. A surprisingly sweet, sugary cloud of smoke blasts Hunk right in the face. He coughs on it as he follows her inside, its taste sticking in the back of his throat.

“Back already?” asks this guy seated on a hovering cushion. He tilts his head up at their entrance, his antenna giving a flick.

“I need you to hook up my friend here,” Faeteri says, pulling Hunk forward.

“Sure.” The guy peers at Hunk through three glassy eyes. “What are you looking for?”

_“I just want to feel good.”_

“That’s what everyone wants.” The guy chuckles. “Can you give me something a little more specific to work with?”

Hunk struggles, at a loss. He doesn’t know anything about this stuff. All he knows is that on Earth the Garrison had a zero tolerance policy in regard to any kind of substance abuse. But these are alien substances and other than going through a particularly headache-y hangover, there weren’t any ill effects. Hunk isn’t worried about that kind of thing, he just wishes he knew what to ask for.

“You’ve got enough for a variety bag,” Faeteri says, shaking the pouch. “You wanna do that, so you can figure out what you’re into?”

Why not?

(A thousand reasons.)

Hunk nods agreeably.

The vendor guy gets up from his cushion and takes them to a little desk with some boxes lined up along it. He swipes a forked tongue over his lips and opens one of the boxes, pulling out a baggie a little bigger than the one Faeteri had the night they met.

Faeteri dumps most of the pouch into the vendor’s hand and he grins as he passes Hunk the baggie.

“Have fun, kid.”

Hunk can hope.

Faeteri takes him to an unoccupied field. Ugly alien bugs buzz through overgrown plants and Hunk feels itchy just looking at them.

“I’m guess you haven’t done many poppers, huh?”

Hunk shakes his head.

“Let me give you a rundown on what you’ve got.”

She takes the baggie from his grasp without further ado and gives it a little shake, holding it up in the air.

“See the pink ones? Those are great if you need to be productive. They really boost you up and make you feel like you can get everything done. Sometimes I take these before missions. The red ones you took with me, so you already what they’re like. The white ones are…strong. I don’t know if you’re ready for those, but nothing can get rid of pain faster.”

Hunk listens carefully, making a mental file of the information.

“And this big black one here that you only got one of? Cut it in half, always,” she says decisively. “The black ones can either make you feel like you’re master of the universe, or they can make you feel like the universe is out to get you. They’re tricky ones, so I never do them alone. Can you remember all that?"

Hunk nods. He thinks he's got them memorized. Pink means a stimulant while red means telepathic grass. White means an extra strength painkiller and black means a gamble. That's easy to remember.

He fishes into the bag and chooses a red one for tonight, not minding at all when Faeteri takes one for herself.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Added new tags. Please heed the new tags. 
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> The following content may be triggering so yeah, please heed the new tags.

“Where did you go?” Pidge asks softly.

_“What are you still doing up?”_

“I asked you first,” she says, raising her chin.

Hunk scratches the back of his head and sighs.

 _“Nowhere,”_ he types. _“I just needed to get some air.”_

She rolls her eyes. “Because there’s nothing like a fresh breath of the recycled oxygen in the Yellow Lion.”

Nope. He’s not going to do this tonight. Hunk silently checks out of the conversation and walks right past her on his way to his room.

“It feels like you hate us sometimes,” she mumbles.

Hunk stops. He glances back and warily meets Pidge’s doleful face. He just shakes his head over and over, stung that she could ever say something like that and yet unable to blame her at all.

“Well, what am I supposed to think when it’s like you can’t stomach being in the same room with me? With any of us?” Pidge bites her lip.

 _“It’s not you guys,”_ he types at last, because he owes her that much. _“I’m just down.”_

Pidge shuffles a few steps closer, the rubbery grips on the bottom of her lion slippers squeaking softly on the floor.

“I know what happened was the worst,” she murmurs, “I know none of us can just make it up to you. But we all want to try.”

Hunk feels the nervous urge to lick his lips. For a second, he feels his tongue too. But it’s a phantom sensation that quickly fades.

 _“I know,”_ he types tiredly. _“Go to bed Pidge.”_

Hunk ducks into his room and when the door snaps closed behind him, he swipes the touchpad to locked. He doesn’t hate his friends. If he hates anyone, he hates this person he hardly recognizes as himself. These days he feels more like a tarpit than a person, this sticky, consuming trap of despair. He doesn’t want her, or any of his friends to get stuck in him.

It’s devastating enough to be stuck inside himself.

* * *

Hunk tries a pink one in the morning with his breakfast of food goo and the hormone capsule. He’s pretty sure they won’t interfere with each other. It doesn’t hit the way the red one did, it’s not as immediate. But when it does hit, it definitely isn’t gradual.

Hunk feels a fiery heat flush through his body. His focus is enhanced and he’s alert like a crossing guard on duty, an energized buzz tingling up his spine. Suddenly his plan to go hide away in the unused orlop deck seems absurd.

Hunk holds his hands out in front of him to see they’re trembling with the urge to do something. They’re not going to still until he puts them to work. His heart pounds in anticipation, the next wave of heat that flashes through him is almost overwhelming.

Hunk rips the pajamas off his body and throws himself into his daily wear, charging down to the kitchen with his emptied food goo bowl in hand. Initially he’d planned to send it to the kitchen on a hover-tray rather than physically return it, apprehensive of the chance he might encounter his friends. Now that seems perfectly acceptable, even preferable.

They can help him decide what to make. He has to do something! His senses are restless and his mind is needy for a project, a task, something, anything to feed the intensity of this motivation.

He’s a food guy at heart. He wants to make something, wants to bake.

His flushed brain fixates on this goal, and all he’s thinking is: _Gotta bake, gotta bake, gotta bake!_

He finds himself sprinting to the kitchen and when he flies through the door, he feels just like a runner breaking through the finish line ribbon. Pidge and Allura break off mid-conversation by the counter and look up, eyes widening.

“What’s wrong?” Pidge asks, mistaking his excitement for alarm.

Hunk hurriedly shakes his head and brings up the holographic keys on his bracelet, fingers so shaky with adrenaline that he needs to retype several times.

_“Nothing. What do you guys think I should bake?”_

Allura and Pidge exchange shocked stares.

“Uhh…” is all that Pidge can say.

Restless energy crackles through Hunk like electrical currents, his fingers impatiently drumming along the empty bowl.

“Well,” Allura begins, recovering her jaw from the floor, “it’s a pleasant surprise to see you so eager about something. I wouldn’t say no to a pie, and we have fresh shoomfruit.”

Hunk nods decisively and rinses his bowl in the sink. He gets the shoomfruit out of the fridge and retrieves the recipe from the little silver box on the shelf. He gathers everything else he needs and almost surprises himself with how quick he’s moving, like a film on fast-forward. Allura and Pidge don’t leave. They just stand by and watch, making conversation.

“I’m probably going to regret asking, but do you need help with anything?” Pidge asks.

Hunk snorts a laugh. The last time Pidge baked with him, he went kind of crazy on her. He didn’t mean to, but he has strict standards when it comes to the craft of cooking. He won’t lower those standards for anyone, not even his friends. The fact she’s offering in spite of this, says something about how much she cares and while his friends’ caring has felt oppressive lately, suddenly…suddenly he can take it.

He even smiles and twirls his way around the counter, planting a grateful kiss on top of her head. Pidge squawks, wriggling in place.

“I haven’t washed my hair yet,” she grouses, even though she sounds more surprised than put off. “Besides what kind of answer is that?”

Hunk waves his hand.

_“I’ve got this. You guys just help me eat it later.”_

“I won’t argue with that,” Allura says, watching with lamb soft eyes.

She and Pidge go back to their conversation and Hunk races through the recipe without missing a beat. He stirs so fast the spoon nearly flies out of his hand. But everything is perfect anyway because he can be speedy without being sloppy, a helpful skill set that few have honed.

But once the pie is in the oven, he gets a little lost. It feels like it’s taking forever to come out. It only bakes for fifteen minutes, but he’s finished cleaning the kitchen in three and the remaining twelve seem like a daunting eternity when he has far too much pep to wait, to just stand here and…stand some more.

The first needles of anxiety penetrate his beautiful bubble of vigor. He gets fidgety and his heart flutters in his chest like a firefly trapped in a bottle.

It’s stupid. It’s just twelve minutes. Twelve minutes is nothing, right?

Logically he knows this. It doesn’t feel like nothing though, not when he has to do something! Something, anything, he needs to move!

“You good?” Pidge asks.

Hunk glances over, both she and Allura are looking at him curiously. Hunk nervously knits his fingers and nods. He’s fine. Logically, he knows he’s fine, but caffeine’s got nothing on whatever it is he took and if it weren’t for the stricter gravity settings he and Pidge reprogramed after the castle went nuts, he’d probably be bouncing off the walls.

“You sure? You’re kinda twitchy.”

Hunk waves dismissively and rapidly types a reply.

_"Kinda anxious about it’s gonna turn out, that’s all. Haven’t baked in awhile."_

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Allura chimes. “It smells lovely.”

Hunk flashes a smile. He paces around just to appease his jittery nerves and while the girls seem a little dubious, neither of them say anything about it.

In twelve minutes the pie comes out, just like it’s supposed to. Hunk leaves it to cool and embarks on a remarkably productive day. He polishes Keith’s paladin armor until it shines like new. He completes the arduous task of cleaning his long neglected room and it takes so long he misses dinner, and he still has a galvanic abundance of momentum to spare.

He cleans the healing pods and helps Coran clean the teleduv too. He happily looses a race with Lance and builds a more effective port for Pidge’s games just because he can. He draws vigor in every breath. Today everything makes sense. His motivation is vibrant and sparkling inside him, he can almost see it glowing through his skin.

Hunk’s day ends in the training room. He dredges up this silent but unrelenting rage that’s taken residence in his gut since his torture and pours it into beating the shit out of the punching bag. Before it was reflexive, an exercise in helplessness. Today that rage too becomes motivation. Motivation to just _do,_ just hit, get it all out.

A little bit leaves in every fleck of blood that inevitably paints the bag. Because once he starts he can’t stop and ten hits turn to two hundred in the blink of an eye, and after that he looses track and just trusts the flow of his high.

It’s a good high, a useful high. He’s breathless and yet he isn’t tired at all. Sweat drenches his clothes and plasters his hair to his neck, but the only thing Hunk feels is drive.

* * *

Hunk doesn’t want it to be an everyday thing.

He really doesn’t. He isn’t stupid. This stuff can’t be good for his body. There are certainly people who need to take stimulants, but Hunk isn’t one of them. Even if he was, these particular stimulants, pretty pink marble pills, were not manufactured with human consumption in mind.

He doesn’t know what they’re actually called. He has no idea what’s in them and they’re strong. Like, crazy strong. One pebble of a pill kept him going nonstop for nineteen vargas.

He didn’t feel bad the next day, not like the crap he drank with Matt and not like the couple times he took the red ones. He felt a little bit overheated maybe, at worst, but he wasn’t debilitated. That’s a kind of encouraging sign, but he’s still not reckless enough to think the lack of a hangover means they’re safe.

Hunk doesn’t want this to be an everyday thing. Of course, he doesn’t, he knows better than that.

But…

It was good. Felt good and he actually got some shit done. He actually got to spend some time with the people who love him and not feel like garbage. It was a solid mood booster and for awhile, he got to be an actual person instead of a tarpit resembling one.

Hunk doesn’t want this to be an everyday thing. Not forever, anyway, but it probably won’t hurt to take them for a little while. He needs to manage himself somehow, after all, he can’t hide forever. Shiro already called him out on withdrawing. He’s got to do something to kick himself into gear and he’s found something that helps do that.

It’s probably beneficial to take them for awhile, he reasons. Until he gets his real morale back. And maybe he doesn’t exactly need to worry about his body anyway. His body is already pretty fucked up. It’s irreversibly mutilated, missing pieces and etched with new scars that forever foster the worst memories he has.

And then there’s the healing pods. If they can restore a person near death, well, why the heck shouldn’t be able to pop in to fix the potential side effects of recreational toxins?

Hunk doesn’t want this to be an everyday thing for all times.

For temporary times, it seems like his best bet. Doesn’t seem like he has much more to lose, really.

* * *

Faeteri’s always somewhere in the asteroid belt. Hunk supposes she must live around there, but he’s never actually seen her home. She’s at that bar, or in that field, or hanging out on the rusty, empty bleachers in what Hunk can only assume was some kind of athletic field or another.

That’s where her found her today and now they’re hanging out underneath them, finding some relief in the shade. Today this sun’s rays are baking. It’s weird because where the planet where the castle is station right now is a glacial ball of instant frostbite exposure. What is that place called again?

Something with a V. Valeifor? Volkior?

Eh, doesn’t matter.

“Whenever I see you, you always wanna do the red ones,” Fateteri chuckles, dumping a few into her hand.

_“I can’t do the red ones back home.”_

The castle isn’t home exactly, but at this point, it might as well be. It’s close enough. It’s as close as he’s going to get for a long time and he has to face the reality that he might not make it back home at all. This war might kill him. It’s latest attempt was more successful than not.

Faeteri tilts her head. “How come?”

 _“My friends,”_ he taps, and takes a pill out of her hand.

Hunk can get away with the stimulants around his team. If he seems extra hyped or nervous, he always has his anxiety to blame it on. And if he’s motivated, they probably consider it progress. The fact that they keep him up is a little more suspect, but as long as he doesn’t make too much noise during the night-cycles, he’s in the clear.

But the red ones are some kind of hallucinogen and there’s no way he could explain away the kind of behavior they bring on. He’s loses control when the red ones are singing through his bloodstream, he’s seeing things that are not objectively there, no matter how beautiful they are, and time as a concept dismantles itself to introduce concepts that exist only in intensified euphoria.

Lance gave him a pass the first time, but Hunk doesn’t foresee leniency the second time he gets caught petting his pillow for an hour.

“They don’t approve of fun?” She raises a brow.

 _“Not this kind. At least, I don’t think they would. They’d worry about it.”_ Hunk pops the pill in his mouth and swallows.

“Oh.” Faeteri blinks and takes a couple herself. “Gotcha. They don’t get it, but they mean well.”

 _“They always mean well, but I don’t need to be monitored.”_ Hunk groans and rubs at his temples.

Every since he got tortured, they’ve been too much and he doesn’t know whose fault it is. Is it his own fault? For succumbing to the trauma? For shutting them out?

Is it their fault? For shoving themselves into his space with misguided attempts to make it better? For failing to realize there’s no making it better, no taking it away?

“At least they give a shit,” Faeteri says bluntly. “They’re overprotective and it’s gotta be a drag, don’t get me wrong…but you have people who worry about you. Not everybody does.”

 _“Do you?”_ Hunk types, curious.

“I guess I have some friends in my squadron. But they’re not the people I lost. They’re never gonna be. And it’s not fair for me to wish they were, but I do anyway.” Faeteri hugs her knees to her chest. “I don’t wanna talk about it, Y.P. It’ll ruin my buzz.”

Hunk holds his hands up to show it’s cool and lies back in the grass while he waits for his own buzz to kick in. It doesn’t take too long. A dazzling wave envelopes him, whispering poetic nothings to ward off his worries.

Hunk closes his eyes and when he opens them, rainbows parade across the sky. Friendly fish surf up and down them, their scales iridescent and fins fanning. Faeteri begins to laugh, not roaring, vivacious laughter, but contented, soothed burbling. Happy tears slide down her cheeks, beady and colorful like button candies. Hunk goes to lick them, briefly forgetting that he does not have a tongue to lick with.

“What’re you doing, ya weirdo,” she laughs, playfully pushing at him.

She only has three arms normally, but the shapes of the world lose their solidity and shift like a kaleidoscope, obscuring her form until she has six arms, or seven, or maybe even ten. She loses arms and her form altogether, appearing as a shimmery, giggling blob of cheer.

She puts her hands on his face and strokes his cheeks, her laugher pouring into him. It pools like honey in his heart and travels back up through his own mouth in peals. Her fingers slide over his skin soft and fuzzy, like a sun warmed peach at the peak of ripeness.

She could pet him all day and he’d never make her stop. But she stops all by herself and he could weep at the loss of her touch, but before he can, she’s urging him up.

“I got music,” she’s saying, fumbling a pocket open as her fingers morph before his eyes.

An small, pear-shaped music player tumbles out and she screws around with the settings for a minute or two. When the music finally plays it doesn’t sound like it’s coming from the player at all. It sounds like it’s rising up from the grass, the ground itself moving up and down beneath them as through it’s breathing.

Maybe they aren’t on a planet at all. Maybe it’s a giant animal like the Balmera, except with lungs. It exhales the beats, rhythmic and pounding. Faeteri pulls him into a dance and the world around them becomes a metallic strobe, flashing silver and gold. She moves like a cobra to the will of its charmer, graceful and hypnotic. Hunk melts into the movement with her and for a little while, all is well.

* * *

“This is magnificent!” Coran declares, clapping him on the back. “I can’t believe you cooked this entire feast by yourself.”

Hunk basks in the praise, beaming triumphantly.

“I can tell they’re authentic dishes by the aroma.” Coran chuckles softly and rests a hand on his hip. “Our Geepling guests are definitely going to appreciate this. I know I told you to fix something, but I was expecting a snack tray, not a buffet table. This must’ve taken you all night.”

_“Just about.”_

“Well then, go get some sleep.” Coran gently bumps his shoulder. “You must be exhausted.”

Hunk shrugs. Theoretically he should be exhausted, but he actually feels wired. Maybe when Coran moves on, he’ll slip back into the kitchen and make some dessert too.

* * *

Allura performs a cursory twirl, the gossamer tiers of the skirt swishing around her ankles. “I don’t know. It’s comfortable but I’m not sure it’s formal enough. What do you think, Hunk?”

 _“I think if you like it, you should get it,”_ Hunk taps. _“You’re allowed to get something nice for yourself, Princess. You don’t have to be a diplomat all the time.”_

Allura pauses. Slowly, the worry dissolves from her face and a tentative smile unfurls.

“I suppose you’re right. Thank you, and thank you for getting us those coupons.” Allura shimmies over and presses a kiss to his cheek.

She pulls back with a little gasp and covers her lips with the tips of her fingers. Hunk raises a brow.

“You’re rather warm,” she murmurs, brows knitting. “Are you feeling alright?”

Hunk bobs his head and waves it off.

“Are you sure?”

Hunk nods again.

“Alright. As long as you’re sure, let’s go find something you like. Personally, I think you’d be just dashing in Drule fashion.”

Hunk exhales a fond sigh and lets Allura drag him off to the Drule outlet.

* * *

Pidge is grouchy when she first emerges from the healing pod. Lance drapes his jacket over her shivering shoulders. Coran gives her a followup exam just to make sure it the healing cycle was successful. And it was, it fixed everything from the rib fractures to her punctured spleen.

She’s just irritable because as Hunk knows from experience, the pod is not fun. You come out cold and weak and wobbly and sometimes kinda sore.

The plate of alien-equivalent peanut butter cookies he puts in front of her begins the real defrost. And then Hunk opens up her laptop and proudly showcases his latest achievement.

Pidge studies the screen, crumbs smattering her mouth and eyes widening.

“You reverse engineered that virus? Dude, do you realize what we could do with that?”

Hunk grins, nodding eagerly.

“I never even thought of that, I was too caught up in debugging our counter ware. This is perfect!”

Pidge reaches for another cookie, but pauses, blinking owlishly. “Hey…you okay?”

Hunk makes a face, noncomprehending.

“Well you’re sweating like me in a sauna,” she says, wrinkling her nose.

 _“I hit the training deck,”_ he covers.

He didn’t really, but he thinks he will. He needs to do something because he’s downright uncomfortably restless. It’s like his nerves are working overtime and he can’t shut them off.

* * *

The sand on the Vogirk beach is pastel pink. It reminds him of cotton candy. Their ocean is slightly sweet rather than salty, and that reinforces the comparison.

“Feels good, right?” Lance asks, beside him on the sand and breathless from the swim race back to shore, butterfly style because that’s the hardest one and sometimes Hunk just likes to challenge him.

But it did feel good. And it feels good now to be next to him, soaking up the sunlight. Getting to see him outside of the armor as they get to spend a few precious hours outside of the war. That’s left its mark on Lance too. Between his shoulder blades is thick keloid scarring. To Hunk it looks something like a deformed tarantula, big blotchy body and twisted legs forever splattered on his best friend’s skin. Without really thinking about it, Hunk reaches out to touch.

“Mm,” Lance hums. “I think that’s the one I got when I saved Coran. Tainted crystal, remember?”

Hunk snorts.

 _How could I forget?_ he writes into the sand.

“It seems like a long time ago.” Lance shrugs. He reaches out too and lightly traces his fingers over the puffy eel of scarred flesh slithering up Hunk’s leg. “That was more recent…do you wanna talk about it?”

Hunk shakes his head.

“Okay. It’s not something I wanna bug you about, obviously, but I know, uhm. I mean, I know it was bad. You’ve been really different since it happened and there’s some things we notice, you know?”

Hunk freezes.

Is Lance onto him? Are they all onto him? Maybe he’s not as good at keeping his habit a secret as he thought.

 _Things like what?_ he scrawls into the sand, apprehensive.

“For starters, you’re dropping weight left and right.”

Hunk balks, snorts ruefully.

_Lot of people would consider that a good thing._

“Sure, superficial assholes would, but— wait, are you losing it on purpose?” Lance blinks incredulously.

Hunk gives an uncomfortable wince and shakes his head. He’s noticed this too. He thinks it’s the stimulants, mostly, but his eating habits have altered in the wake of the whole tongueless thing. And he can tell Lance a little about that part, he supposes, if only to assuage his concern.

_I can’t taste as well as I used to, so I don’t snack as much. And I stay away from bigger meals because they’re more to swallow._

“You have trouble swallowing?” Lance catches his breath.

_Not exactly. It’s just easier to choke without a tongue._

Lance suddenly looks like he’s about to cry and Hunk loops an arm around his shoulders, pulls him close.

 _Don’t worry about it,_ he etches, the grains of sand sticking to his fingers.

“No duh, I’m going to worry about it,” Lance mutters sadly. “I can’t imagine what that does to you.”

_It sucks but I’m getting used to it._

Disbelief glints in Lance’s gaze and in that moment, Hunk feels like he should tell him what he’s been up to. He feels like he should tell him he’s high right now. That lately he is more than he’s not. He’s not quite up there with the kites but he isn’t on the ground either and it doesn’t feel good anymore, it just feels necessary.

Hunk wants to tell Lance that it scares him that it’s starting to feel necessary because he’s gone on a couple missions high too and he should know better than that. He should be better than that. A good paladin wouldn’t endanger the team with that kind of recklessness. Nothing happened but it could have, and that’s bad enough.

He needs to get his shit together…and none of that is Lance’s responsibility. They’re having a good time. Why should Hunk ruin that?

Hunk squashes the urge to confess and instead sweeps an arm toward the water.

“You wanna go back in?”

Hunk nods and climbs to his feet. Lance gets up too and they happily splash their way through the shallows and out to the waves.

* * *

They’re going over some battle strategies with the Blade of Marmora and Keith keeps staring at him. It makes Hunk nervous. He starts drumming his fingers on the underside of the table, jitterbugs jumping from nerve to nerve.

He’s being distracting and Shiro shoots him a warning look. Pidge ends up holding his hand under the table just to make him stop, shaking her head like she doesn’t get what his deal is. And of course she doesn’t.

Keith is still staring.

Hunk is fully aware of how different he looks and yes, this is Keith’s first time seeing him since he happened, but that doesn’t give him the right to stare. It’s making Hunk’s skin crawl. He tries to focus on the meeting at hand. It isn’t easy with Keith’s eyes burrowing into his skull and his heart getting squeezed by an invisible fist.

Kolivon brings up a diagram on a holoscreen, which Allura calls into question. It isn’t the nasty, barbed questioning she would’ve sliced him with back when she was still hung up on collaborating with Galra. She simply disagrees with some aspects of the plan.

Hunk wishes he were thinking clearly enough to determine which side he took, or if he had any ideas of his own to offer. But he can’t think about anything other than Keith’s stare and how nervous it’s making him.

What the hell is his deal?

Hunk knows Keith’s social skills aren’t exactly the greatest, but does he really not have any semblance of how weird it is just to gawk at people.

Could Shiro have said something about Hunk crashing in his room?

Is he mad about it?

There’s no reason for him to be mad. Hunk stopped doing that awhile ago.

Allura and Kolivon come to a compromise. One of his subordinates that Hunk doesn’t know pulls up a different diagram. Hunk gets antsy, starts tapping his foot and Pidge pointedly tugs on his hand. Okay, okay, he’s good. Keith’s still staring, but whatever.

It’s no reason to make a scene. There are more important things going on, they have to sabotage a Galra weapon launch. This should be his priority.

.  
.  
.

After the meeting, Hunk scurries off to the kitchen. He aims to bake to clear his head, if nothing else. He’s already taking out the ingredients he needs for simple space fudge, when Keith appears in the doorway.

“Hey.”

Hunk narrows his gaze, internally debating his current feelings regarding Keith. On one hand he’d missed him greatly and he wants to give him a hug and ask him what he wants to eat. On the other hand, he wants to shake him back and fourth and chew him out for bad manners.

Hunk settles on a simple wave. Keith aside, he’s mostly just restless and fidgety and in the mood for some fudge. That shouldn’t be too hard to eat. He always makes it moist and velvety. Hunk digs around in the fridge for some butter substitute, pushing some leftovers out of the way to get to it.

“Hunk, I’m just gonna come out and ask. Are you high?”

The butter substitute drops from Hunk’s hand as he jolts, banging his head against the fridge’s ceiling. He tries to school his expression into a mask of innocence, and when he turns around Keith has moved right up to the counter, leaning over it and peering at him intently.

“Your pupil is a pinpoint,” Keith continues solemnly. “And you’re so amped up, you can’t even sit still.”

 _“I have anxiety,”_ Hunk reminds him.

“You had it under control when I left.”

Hunk gasps, painfully raking his fingers through his hair. He smacks his hands down on the countertop hard enough to make Keith flinch and palms still stinging, heatedly taps into his gauntlet.

_“A lot happened after you left! Especially to me!”_

“…you’re right,” Keith says apologetically, eyes downcast. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you got hurt.”

Hunk huffs an aggravated sound and then deflates.

_“Whatever. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference.”_

“But maybe it would have. At the least, I should’ve come back after I heard about it.” Keith puts a hand on his shoulder.

Hunk grunts and irritably shrugs him off.

_“If you feel so bad about it, why is the first thing you say to me in months a freaking accusation?”_

Guilt floods over Keith’s face and he uncomfortably runs his fingers over the blade sheathed on his hip.

“I didn’t mean to sound like that,” Keith says quietly. “Seeing how wired up you were reminded me of someone I used to know. I guess I jumped to conclusions.”

A sudden rotten feeling twists Hunk’s stomach in a knot.

_“Someone you used to know?”_

“A foster sister I had a long time ago. I was old enough to figure out what she was doing, but I didn’t really let it on.”

_“What happened to her?”_

“She ran away from the home when the parents found out. I didn’t see her again.”

_“Were you close?”_

Keith shakes his head. “Nah, but she was kinda nice when she wasn’t bouncing off the walls. She never picked on me. And she got me slushes from the convenience store sometimes.”  
  
Hunk purses his lips and gives a short nod.

There’s an awkward pause and then Keith clears his throat. “So how have you been, with everything?”

Hunk shrugs and buses himself with getting out the appropriate cookware.

“Okay.” Keith winces. “No sell?”

Hunk sets down a bowl and shakes his head as he types.

_“It’s not you. I’m just sick of being asked things I don’t know how to answer.”_

“Oh.” Keith frowns, eyes wavering before he looks away.

Hunk pours separates the dry ingredients from the wet ones and gets to work, not particularly minding Keith’s presence but engaging more with his project. Keith doesn’t seem to mind. He gets himself a water packet and leans back against the wall, just chilling out and letting Hunk do his thing.

It’s actually kind of nice. Keith isn’t trying too hard. He’s not imposing solutions or digging deep into the bleak complexities of Hunk’s emotional state. They’re both just here, existing alongside each other in the same space.

“What are you making?” he asks after a little bit, watching Hunk mix.

Hunk pauses to answer. _“Alien fudge.”_

“The orange kind?”

Hunk nods and resumes mixing.

“Cool.”

* * *

Hunk knows he fucked up the moment they breach Qorkau’s atmosphere and are met with a Galra armada.

Qorkau was fine when they left it. It was stable, safe, seemingly off the Empire’s radar in the wake of a relatively flawless liberation. Today the plan was simply to transport some supplies and further discuss their alliance. Nothing that would require much thinking or effort, so Hunk didn’t think anything of swallowing down a couple pink poppers.

He wasn’t expecting a fight— none of them were expecting a fight, but they’ve flown into a shit storm. A giant holoscreen flickers in the sky, projecting the horror in the streets in real time. The Qorkau princess dangles half dead from a pole on the city platform, beaten almost beyond recognition. She is both being held hostage and used as an example to her people of the dangers of resistance.

“Quiznak!” Allura snarls over the comms. “I’m going to get the princess, I’ll leave the fleet to the rest of you!”

The Blue Lion jets downward and PIdge flashes in to cover her, the lurid pink strike from the battleship above bouncing off the Green Lion’s shield.

Hunk’s mouth goes dry as dread grinds his guts to a pulp. He is high. He doesn’t have time to dwell on this as Shiro starts spouting orders.

“Attack the primary warship! Bypass the fighters unless they’re gunning for the ground!”

Everybody else affirms but Hunk is mentally sprawling. He feels the cabin vibrate as Yellow takes a hit and he’s so scrambled, he doesn’t know where it comes from. He shouldn’t be fighting like this, he doesn’t know if he can trust himself to be battle smart like this.

“Hunk, what are you doing!?” Pidge demands, bewildered.

Yellow rattles with the absorption of a bigger impact and the Lion itself gives off a frequency of alarm. Hunk’s teeth clack together and he almost falls out of his pilot chair. Holy shit, he needs to get out of the way!

He frantically grabs the controls and yanks. He’s just doing rather than thinking, brain on high alert and every nerve ignited.

All he has to do is _do_ , just go, just plow forth and get through this battle before he can screw himself up by overthinking it. He’s high, oh well, it’s just a stimulant, it’s not like he’s seeing unicorns. Nothing he can do about it now, he’s already here and he has to fight and he can’t choke now!

Hunk sweeps back to gain momentum and then barrels forward, ramming Yellow into the behemoth warship head-on. He pulls back so fast it’s dizzying, activates the booster rocket in tandem. His heart hammers painfully against his constricting ribcage, and he can’t start firing fast enough.

The warship rocks with the barrage of hits from him, from everyone. A particularly powerful blast from the Black Lion’s wings takes out the entire vertical stabilizer, the thing collapsing in a shower of violet sparks. The clamor of mournful metal screeches and clangs reverberates through the airspace.

Today’s surprise chaos is going to turn around after all. The fighters are swarming, but they won’t be nearly as difficult to destroy. The Green Lion’s tail swings and strikes the one flying at it like a bat, catapulting it through space. A ray of hope cuts through Hunk’s worries.

Then the Qorkau princess screams.

On the screen, Allura is locked in combat with Commander Gnov on the platform. She’s struggling, her bayard’s been knocked out of her grasp, one arm limp and bleeding. It’s all she can do to evade the sword slashing at her face. And before Hunk can even even draw his next breath, an explosion booms in his blindspot.

He turns and shock ripples through him as he watches the aftermath, the castle’s particle barrier blinking off the blow. The primary warship is damaged but it can still fire and if that explosion is anything to go by, it can still fire hard.

“I’m going go help Allura,” Lance declares, voice cracking through the comms.

Hunk’s already charging Yellow’s cannon. He isn’t sure how it happens. If it happens because he’s rushing to retaliate before the castle can take another hit. If it happens because his hands are shaking and his aim is off. If it happens because he’s so keyed up about being stoned it’s clouding his awareness. Some combination of all the above.

Hunk fires and the Red Lion takes a direct hit.

Lance’s scream turns Hunk’s blood to ice. It is a sound that is going to haunt him for the rest of his life. Red’s eyes flicker and dim. The Lion is suspended, offline, vulnerable to the next warship strike. The Black Lion plunges in and pulls it out of range just in time, the blast tearing through the space it was a split second before.

“Lance?” Shiro calls urgently. “Lance, can you hear me?”

A soft, dry cough unleashes floodgates of relief through Hunk.

“Uh-huh,” Lance groans faintly. “Thanks for the save.”

“Are you alright?”

“Um…I think so, but Red’s not…Hunk, what the hell?”

And he doesn’t have an answer. He swerves Yellow out of the path of the fighters spurring toward him, absently returns it with the tail canon. The sheer severity of his error leaves him petrified and he has no way to articulate it, because he can barely believe it just happened.

 _It was an accident,_ he types numbly.

His gauntlet’s synced to the comms link, so it goes over, but the others don’t have much time to dwell on this lousy excuse because another blast from the warship sends them scattering.

“New plan,” Shiro announces, aggravation palatable. “I’ll take care of the warship. Pidge, you protect Lance until the Red Lion’s back online. Hunk, go help Allura and make sure you watch where you’re aiming!”

Hunk gulps, wrenched with guilt. He doesn’t even register the others’ replies as he dives down to the Qorkau surface. Anxiety throttles through him and he feels violently out of sorts, like he’s trapped on a too fast rollercoaster ride. He messed up, yeah, he messed up super bad, but he doesn’t have he time to obsess over it right now!

He has a job to do, they all have jobs to do, and if he’s too caught up in obsessing over his fuck up, he’s just going to fuck up again and Allura will pay the price! He’s already put one teammate out of commission! If he keeps this up, he’s going to cost them this fight!

Hunk shoves his guilt aside and puts his panic away the best he can. He grips his bayard hard enough to hurt because he’s worried if his hand go lax, it will simply slip from his shaking grasp. He exits Yellow and takes off, destination in sight.

Allura’s still battling Gnov, holding her own even injured and weaponless. She adroitly weaves her way around the sword’s slashes, but evidently didn’t get the chance to free the Qorkau princess before she was rendered unarmed. The princess still hangs from her shackles and Hunk draws a blank.

What does he do first?

Help Allura or free the princess?

He feels like he should know what to do, he’s been a paladin for awhile now, why doesn’t he know what to do? How the hell did he let himself hit Lance!?

Wait, crap, he’s losing focus! He’s supposed to worry about that later! Lance is fine, he can worry about it later! Except he can’t worry about it later, because he’s lost his nerve. He’s high and this mission wasn’t supposed to be a fight, but it is and there’s no way out, and he already took Lance down. He cannot trust himself and this deeply frightens him, freezing him up. If he screws up again he’s going to take Allura out of this fight too. Then this planet is going to be lost, people are going to die, and all going to be his fault!

Hunk’s hesitation costs him. A sentry fires from his peripheral vision and he’s too slow to put his shield up in time. He’s struck in the core, and his armor protects him from injury but the impact of the blow knocks him down. He blanks and scrambles up shooting. His cannon blasts blow sentries into scraps and the commotion gives Allura an opportunity.

She breaks from the close combat and swiftly retrieves her own bayard, lashing out in a flourish of florescent blue. Hunk hurries to the captive princess and rips her restraints off. She drops back on unsteady kangaroo like legs and faints against him. Her milky orange blood smears over his armor.

Hunk wildly looks to Allura for direction, his own coherent thought trampled down by turmoil.

“Don’t just stand there!” she snaps, exasperated, sweat dripping from the tip of he nose. She can only spare him a glance, straining to wrest the sword out of Gnov’s grasp. “Go get her help! I can handle this!”

So Hunk dematerializes his bayard and hauls the princess into his arms. He takes off running in the direction he remembers the Qorkau infirmary being in, and hoping fiercely that his memory is reliable right now.

  
.  
.  
.

  
Both Lance and Allura are in healing pods and it is undoubtedly Hunk’s fault. Lance was battered and concussed as a direct result of being hit by Yellow. And while Allura defeated Gnov, she got sliced up like salami in the process and that wouldn’t have happened if Hunk didn’t incapacitate Lance on his way to assist her. Guilt eats away at him like worms infesting an apple, squiggling and squirming until the very core is rotten.

There’s no justification, there’s no excuse. He was careless. He was high. He flipped out when he was supposed to be clear-headed and battle ready.

Hunk can’t let this happen again. Not ever again, he just can’t. They’ve been through too much for him to sabotage everything. He is a paladin and he needs to take responsibility for himself when he’s on duty, he needs to have his faculties in order when he’s piloting. He’ll take feeling like crap a thousand times over endangering everyone else, so he gathers the pink poppers he has left and dumps them in the kitchen sink.

He turns the faucet on and watches them swirl down the drain.

There.

All better.

Well, no, not actually. But at least it’s a start. Hunk splashes some water on his face and breathes deeply. He wonders if he should dump out the other pills too. Just for good measure, maybe?

Or not. It’s not really necessary, is it?

The pink ones were a problem because he got careless with them, he took them indiscriminately. But he only has one black one. He's got a load of the white one, but those are just painkillers. Probably comparable to paracetamol or something. He hasn’t bothered with them. And he takes the red ones with Faeteri and only with her. He never takes them on the castle. Never takes them daily the way he started with the pink ones.

He won’t cause any trouble if he just does them now and then when he’s hanging out on the asteroid belt, right?

It was totally different with the pink ones. He took them casually, recklessly. He should be able to get back on track now that he’s flushed them away. Those became a problem the moment they interfered with his mission performance, but no one is going to get hurt if he messes with the red ones in his personal downtime.

Hunk leaves the kitchen chewing on his nails. Eventually he finds himself in the med-bay. There’s one empty pod between Lance’s and Allura’s, because its scans have been glitchy. For awhile Hunk spends his time pacing back and fourth, but inevitably begins troubleshooting. The pod itself probably works, he thinks the problem lies in the connectivity between it and the scans. The software needs a clean sweep and Hunk can do that much, but if the problem is with the pod itself, that’s another story.

It’s not like he could rejuvenate its mystical properties. The only person who could do that is Allura, and because of him, she’s going to be a popsicle for the rest of the week…

“What was that?”

Hunk turns to see Shiro, gaze hardened and mouth lined in a reproachful frown.

 _“An accident,”_ he types, pained. _“I’m sorry.”_

“No, no,” Shiro huffs, swatting at the air as though he can shoo the excuse like a cloud of gnats. “You’re not a rookie anymore. What really happened, Hunk?”

Hunk shrugs, stuffing his hands into his pockets.

Abruptly, Shiro storms over and grabs him by the shoulders, giving him a rousing shake.

“Are you not taking this seriously?” he snaps, taken aback. “Is the severity of what you did completely lost on you?”

Hunk makes a noise of dissent and jerks away, backpedaling.

_“Of course it’s not!”_

“Then explain to me what went wrong today,” Shiro says levelly. “You hurt Lance and you can’t brush it off. He’s injured, you put everyone else in jeopardy, and now we’re down two paladins. Whatever happened today is not something I can allow to happen again.”

Hunk reticently squeezes his arm, wondering if he should tell the truth. He tells a partial truth instead.

_“We flew into an unexpected fight and I got overwhelmed. I made a panicky mistake.”_

“I don’t accept that,” Shiro argues, shaking his head. “I know you’re better than that. We’ve dealt with surprise battles before and not once did you ever fire on your own teammate.”

Hunk bites his lip and he can’t exactly taste the blood, but he feels its warmth as it blooms from the wound.

 _“I don’t have the answers you want, Takashi,”_ he inputs eventually.

Shiro’s given name is practically a taboo and at this point, maybe Hunk is pissing him off on purpose. Just to get him to go away.

“Whatever is going on with you, Hunk, I don’t know and I can’t make you tell me,” Shiro bows his head in defeat, heaving a breathy sigh. “But you need to remember that you’re apart of this team and we have to be able to count on you. Today we couldn’t do that.”

Hunk flinches, unable to dispute. Shiro’s right, of course, he’s right about everything.

 _“It won’t happen again,”_ he promises, and he hates that this promise is made in a voice that is not his own.

“No,” Shiro agrees, tone like steel. “It definitely won’t.”

* * *

Hunk crashes without the pills. He doesn’t think it’s possible for his mood to get any lower, but somehow it does. He can’t stop crying and he isn’t even exactly sad. He just feels like less without them, without that boost. He’s messed up about how things went down on Qorkau, but guilt makes him nauseous, it never makes him cry. He feels about as lively as a bowl of cold porridge without his daily intake of pink poppers, but lack of energy shouldn’t make him cry either.

But he’s crying anyway, tears flooding like waterfalls from his eye and nose running like a leaky faucet.

All the colorful, illuminating motivation the pinks poured into him dilutes to drab grays and leaves him wilting. The cravings make him itch like this rash on the inside that he just can’t scratch. On top of that, he keeps shaking. He’s got the chills even though he’s sweating and it’s weird. Unsettling.

He expected the cravings. While he didn’t anticipate how low his mood was going to fall, but he did anticipate some kind of despondence. But the chills? The trembles?

That’s uncalled for.

Like, aren’t those withdrawal symptoms?

He can’t be having withdrawals. Only addicts get withdrawals, right?

Eventually the tears taper off. It takes a lot longer than Hunk expected it to, but there’s some relief to found in it. It’s pretty freaky to be crying and not really know why.

He makes his way to the kitchen to get some water. Pidge is there, nibbling on some crackers. He greets her with a tired wave and shuffles around to the fridge, pulling out a water packet.

“You look bad,” she mutters, her tongue poking out to swipe the crumbs from the corner of her mouth.

Hunk grunts irritably and sips from the packet.

“No, seriously, you look like you just crawled out of a Weblum’s butt. Are you sick?”

Hunk pauses. He didn’t consider this earlier. Could he have picked up a bug somewhere?

Yeah, that makes sense. That makes more sense than withdrawal symptoms. He can’t have withdrawal symptoms. He’s definitely not an addict, he wasn’t dependent on the stimulants. He must be sick. Honestly, he should’ve thought of that earlier.

Hunk nods, feeling relieved by this new explanation.

“Probably karma’s way of getting back at you for what you did to Lance,” she says curtly.

Hunk winces, stung by the shame of it. But he nods anyway.

“I guess if karma’s already beating you up for it, I don’t have to,” Pidge continues, voice softening. “You wanna grab a blanket and watch something in the lounge?”

Hunk’s gut reaction is to refuse. Then he stops, changes his mind. He could use the distraction and since he’s evidently ill, she probably won’t demand too much energy or interaction from him. He wearily nods.

* * *

Lance is still in the healing suit as he chews over the sticky buns Hunk baked especially for his pod release. His demeanor is unusually subdued and he eats quietly. The initial welcoming with hugs and such is over with and now it’s just the two of them left at the table, side by side. Hunk isn’t sure if this is good or bad.

Lance finishes off the bun and licks the icing from his fingers with an approving nod.

“It’s a start,” he murmurs, “but if you really want to make it up to me, you have to do all my chores for the next phoeb.”

Hunk exhales relief and bows his head, accepting these considerably generous terms. Lance huffs softly and then his hand is in Hunk’s hair, lightly ruffling it up.

“I’m not mad,” he says, pulling back.

Hunk straightens up and purses his lips.

“Maybe I should be,” Lance goes on, shrugging. “But nope, no boiling rage here. An explanation would be awesome though. I’m not mad but I am confused. Really confused, like, how could you just…”

Hunk shakes his head.

_“It was an accident.”_

Lance snorts. “Obviously. I know you weren’t trying to kill me, but heck. You hit me dead on. Red lost power absorbing the brunt of it and I still had to take an icy pod nap.”

 _“I started panicking and I lost control,”_ Hunk types, choking on an internal tide of guilt.

He just doesn’t know what else to say. There’s no point in telling Lance the whole story. It would just make him worry and there’s no reason for him to worry because Hunk dumped all of the stimulants.

“Oh.” Lance leans back and takes another sticky bun. “Damn. I haven’t seen you spin out like that in a long time.”

_“I’m sorry.”_

“I know.” Lance’s cheeks are stuffed and he looks like a chipmunk. He pauses to swallow and then continues. “But the next time you start spinning out, don’t get all caught up in it. You gotta stop yourself before things get out of control, okay?”

Lance lets out a squeak as Hunk pulls him up in a hug, squeezing him tightly. He hopes the embrace conveys the things he doesn’t think he could express in words, even if he did have the energy to type it all out.

* * *

Things are okay, maybe. Or maybe not like okay, okay, but they’re getting there. He hopes. Once things calm down Shiro lets go of his salt. But Hunk thinks he’s watching him more closely and that’s nerve-wracking. And uncomfortable. And irritating.

But he can’t entirely blame him, all things considered.

It’s hard at first, without the synthetic motivation to fall back on. They did their good though, not just for Hunk but for his team. Or maybe it’s a combination of what they did and just the passage of time that’s given everybody the opportunity to get accustomed to his new reality.

His friends are easier on him. They’re no longer asking him if he’s okay every five freaking seconds, or asking him how they can help, or just up and trying to force help on him in all sorts of unintentionally painful ways. They still try to now and then, but it’s not as intense or excessive as it was before. They aren’t constantly reminding him of the horrible things he already knows too well; that his torture happened and things will never be the same.

They let him interact at his own pace and Hunk does think the stimulants are partially to thank for that. They made him happy and his friends got to see that happiness, that vitality, in him. It probably made them worry less, even though he gets glimpses of lingering concern now and then.

And he feels bad about that, actually wants to make up for it, so he tries harder than he did before. He tries to participate at least once a week. He asks that of himself, to push forth at least that much. Sometimes he can’t do any more than that, but the thing is, the more he does, the easier it gets.

So once a week inevitably leads to twice a week because it feels genuinely manageable. And yeah, still, sometimes it just feels like he’s putting his time in. But more and more, he’s starting to enjoy these things again and that’s promising.

After a awhile of building his energy stores, he even taps Allura on the shoulder and tells her,

_“Teach me.”_

“Teach you?” Allura’s ears give a curious wiggle.

 _“This isn’t me,”_ he thunks his thumb against his bracelet. _“But my hands are me. I’m a cook and an engineer. I do everything with my hands, I might as well talk with them too.”_

“Oh!” Allura gasps and grins broadly, gaze glittering.

She grabs Hunk by the hand and excitedly totes him down the hallway.

“Coran, get the flashcards! Hunk wants to learn nonverbal Altean!”

* * *

His friends learn with him. Allura is always enthusiastic to share Altean culture and this is no exception. Hunk is up for it, most of the time. There’s appeal in being able to express himself naturally and really, he’s always considered his hands his best feature.

He wholeheartedly appreciates the rest of the team joining in on the lessons. It makes him feel supported and it’s one way they can help that isn’t overbearing. It feels good to learn together and for them to do something _with_ him, rather than for him.

Hunk is starting to get comfortable again. He was always going, going, going on the stimulants. They were stellar for motivation, but not so much for relaxing. There wasn’t any relaxing, actually, he physically couldn’t bear inactivity. But these days the quiet things don’t seem so fraught, it’s okay to mellow down and let Pidge nap in his lap or do some neat alien puzzles with Shiro.

Things are actually pretty okay.

* * *

But the times when things aren’t pretty okay, they’re downright dismal. Sometimes his efforts fall short no matter how hard he tries and he can’t forgive himself for not being better. He sees that tarpit in the mirror again and the worst memories he has suffocate him like sand.

Sometimes it isn’t only frustrating that he can barely taste what’s in the bowl, it is absolutely agonizing. He thinks back to singing lullabies to his niece and nephew and isn’t sure whether he wants to sob or punch the wall.

Sometimes an unintentional sneak-up on his blindspot doesn’t just startle him, it leaves him on edge for the rest of the day. He develops an infrequent neck ache from looking over his shoulder all the time.

Sometimes swallowing down the hormone capsule isn’t just a daily necessity, it is an intrusive reminder of incredibly complicated uncertainty. He’s not going to be able to give his parents grandchildren, at least not conventionally. And he’s not sure if he’s ever going to be able to enjoy sex. Maybe his drive for it will return if he keeps up with the hormones, but he can’t even piss without confronting the butchery below the belt, so how the hell is he supposed to have confidence in bed?

And even taking his personal mutilation out of the equation, sometimes there are devastating failures like Kythra. Carnage that yanks him out of himself and burns the big picture into his brain. They try, they all try so hard, but it is impossible to stop every massacre.

Hunk still bakes to clear his head and sure, it helps. On an easy day, sometimes all he has to accomplish is a platter of tarts to put everything in perspective. On a hard day, neither baking nor clarity are enough. Admitting this to himself is so hard it’s almost shameful.

* * *

“Hey, Y.P.” Faeteri grins lopsidedly. “No time no see.”

Hunk waves and sits down next to her on the grass, watching some bugs buzz by.

“How’s it going?”

Hunk shrugs. _“How about you?”_

“Could be better,” she lets out a sigh as she pushes herself up and blows the longer part of her blue bangs out of her face. “I’m broke, so unless you got poppers or GAC, we’re hanging sober.”

_“Still got the black one and the white ones. What do you think?”_

“We could split the black one,” she says. “Or you could trade a white one for a handful of reds.”

Hunk stops, surprised. How could a strong paracetamol be more valuable than a psychedelic?

 _“Really?”_ he asks.

Faeteri gives him an odd look.

“You haven’t actually tried the white ones, huh?”

Hunk shakes his head.

“Well…maybe that’s good,” she muses. “They’re pretty expensive so you don’t wanna get too into them, ya know?”

Now Hunk is curious.

_“Should we do the white ones?”_

“Uhh…” Faeteri hesitates, squinting uncertainly. “How strong is your body?”

Hunk scoffs and gives her an exemplary flex. Faeteri smacks a hand to her forehead.

“No, not like that, dummy. Our bodies are different so our tolerances probably are too. I’m asking you if earthlings have durable constitutions.”

Hunk considers.

 _“I think we do,”_ he decides. _“As a species we’ve survived three world wars and bounced back from practically cataclysmic radiation after we polluted our atmosphere to the point of ruin.”_

Faeteri gasps, her jaw hanging open.

“Okay, wow,” she whistles. “You’ve probably got a higher tolerance than me and I’ve been building mine for awhile. Let’s do the white ones.”

She reaches into the bag and takes one, popping it casually. Hunk follows suit.

“Earthlings sound invincible so I’m sure you’re good, but if it start feeling weird, don’t play it off.”

 _“Weird how?”_ Hunk asks, a bit uneasy.

“If you’re not getting enough air, or you get sleepy and pukey at the same time.” Faeteri scratches at her scalp. “That sorta deal.”

Hunk gasps, flushed with alarm.

“Relax,” Faeteri insists, nonchalantly waving a hand. “None of that is common. Just worst case scenarios.”

 _“You couldn’t have mentioned that before I took it?”_ Hunk scowls.

“You didn’t ask,” she says impishly.

Hunk groans and puts his head in his hands.

“Don’t worry about it.” Suddenly she’s patting his back. “Just chill, let it take you.”

Hunk doesn’t think he’s going to be able to enjoy this. The fear of those side effects is going to be a raincloud over whoever kind of high he gets. He’s going to spend the whole time anticipating doom.

Except when the high actually hits, he couldn’t be proven more wrong.

Heaven cascades over him, all his pain dissolving until pain itself is like a foreign concept. The sheer comfort Hunk feels is breathtaking, an all encompassing embrace of love. It’s as though he’s back at home sandwiched between his parents in the warmest hug he’s ever known. He leans back on his elbows and melts into it, a marshmallow in a sea of hot cocoa. There’s no hallucinations this time. The world looks the same but it doesn’t feel the same at all. It feels safe. Hunk feels secure in himself. He isn’t worried about anything, peace pumps into him in every loving lap of the breeze against his skin.

_“This is the best.”_

“Told you it’d be fine.” Faeteri grins and nuzzles her head into his shoulder like an exceptionally affectionate cat.

Hunk doesn’t think he’s ever felt this good before. Even his anxiety, a lifelong battle, is no more. Just a bad memory banished from tainting this euphoria. He’s in harmony with himself and he’s not a tarpit anymore, or if he is, it must not matter because he’s never felt more whole.

God, he’d give anything to make this forever.

.  
.  
.

Coming down sucks. It almost makes him cry. He gathers up his stuff anyway, getting ready to go.

“You’re probably gonna want to take another one,” Faeteri guesses, standing up and stretching until some of her joints pop. “but hold off until you can’t. You don’t want to blow through those. They’re pricey.”

Hunk nods, tucking away this information away for later. He bids her goodbye and boards Yellow, trying to push away the uneasiness that’s sprouted in the comedown.

He already wants to take another one and get right back up there.

* * *

Hunk holds out for a day, almost two, before he inevitably digs out the bag and pops out a white one.

For awhile in his room, Hunk just rolls the pill around in his hand. It’s small, slightly powdery to the touch.

He has this deep gut feeling that taking it is the last thing he should do, but at the same time, he doesn’t think he’s ever wanted anything more.

(except, perhaps, his missing body parts)

Hunk rolls it around and purses his lips. The powdery residue dusts his fingers and he rubs them together for no particular reason, watching the little white specks flake off. He has this feeling and it is same feeling he had before he bit his own tongue off.

There are some decisions you make that determine the direction your life will go in next. Decisions that you shouldn’t ever take likely, because once you make them, you can never go back to the person you were before you made them. Biting his tongue off changed things forever, changed him forever.

And Hunk feels that this is like that. If he swallows this tiny white pill, no more suspect than the aspirin he initially thought it was, he’s going to go somewhere he can’t return from. But…

But what if that place is better?

He felt like a better person when he took it. It wasn’t just euphoria, that the world was better, it was like _he_ was better. An improved version. Like all of his good traits were thrust forward instead of sinking under the muck.

Hunk’s been trying lately. So hard. And mostly things are okay. He does his missions and spends time with his friends. He addresses his new reality with grace and he can confront it without closing off, usually.

These are improvements. Or at least, they seemed like improvements. They pale in comparison to the goodness the high brought out in him. These measly stepping stones are what he has to show for months of struggle, but one pill, and his entire being had an instant upgrade. No hurt, no badness.

He’s rationalizing. He is rationalizing and he knows this, in the very pits of his stomach, instinct screams at him to chuck the whole bag out the airlock. But he’s ruined. The torture started it and that perfect high finished him off. The temptation is too powerful. He simply can’t go back to chugging along like he doesn’t have the ability to experience indescribable rapture in the palm of his hand.

Hunk pops it in his mouth, swallows it dry.

* * *

“So, how long is that going to cook?” Lance asks, hungrily eyeing the casserole dish while Hunk grates some honest to goodness real cheese, courtesy of Kaltenecker.

Hunk pauses and peeks at the clock.

“Varga,” he signs.

“Aw man, I can’t wait that long.” Lance groans and morosely plunks his cheek against the counter. “We missed lunch because of that attack and breakfast was forever ago.”

Hunk points to the fruit bowl on the table. Lance glances to it and wrinkles his nose.

“The space plums smell weird and everything else is touching them.”

Hunk can only shake his head, going back to grating. Maybe Lance is in one of those moods where he just wants to complain. He gets like that sometimes and Hunk doesn’t really mind putting up with it.

“Hunk!” Lance gasps, standing abruptly. “You’re bleeding!”

Crap. Hunk drops the grater and yanks his hand out of the bowl before his blood can contaminate the cheese. Lance swipes a towel from the counter and hurries over, pressing it flush to the wound.

“Yikes,” Lance hisses softly. “Pretty good chunk of skin you grated off there. That’s gotta hurt.”

Hunk bobs his head, feigning a grimace. In truth, he’s still too high to feel it. Pain just doesn’t register on the white ones.

* * *

Pidge shakes him awake, and Hunk blinks rapidly, surprised. He didn’t realize he nodded off.

“C’mon, Hunk,” she moans petulantly, waving her tablet back and fourth. “You’re the only person on the castle I didn’t think could be bored by this discovery!”

“Sorry,” he signs, jaw stretching in a yawn.

 _“I wasn’t bored,”_ he adds. _“I thought it was cool, I’m just tired.”_

In actuality, he doesn’t even recall what discovery she was talking about.

* * *

“No, that’s the sign for boat,” Allura corrects. “For ‘ship’ you have to hold your thumb a little higher and move your first two fingers, like…well, here.”

Allura gently manipulates his hand and Hunk gives an appreciative smile.

But Allura’s own smile falters and she tilts her head, giving him an uncertain look. “We can stop for today, if you like.”

Hunk tilts his head.

“Well, you seem rather distracted.” Allura folds her hands.

Oops. That’s his bad. He’s trying to center, but he’s also up on a glittering cloud.

* * *

"Do you want a refrigeration unit in your room?”

Hunk glances up and shakes his head.

“Are you sure?” Coran asks. “It wouldn’t be any hassle to install one.”

Hunk shrugs uncertainly.

“You haven’t been taking as much from the kitchen stores lately,” Coran notes, trace of concern in his tone.

_“You pay attention to that?”_

“Of course I do, I need to keep track of what needs replenishing.” Coran nods. “I also know you didn’t have any dinner tonight. Would you like me to make you something?”

Hunk smiles but shakes his head. The white ones seem to depress his appetite even more than the pink ones did. Hunk isn’t particularly worried about it. It’s not like he was underweight to begin with.

* * *

Hunk crashes on the couch and wakes up to the cool inside of Shiro’s wrist against his forehead.

He soundlessly parts his lips and signs a tired, “What?”

“Hey.” Shiro pulls back. “You feeling alright?”

Hunk nods, pauses as he sluggishly works out what the Altean sign for ‘why’ is. Lately he’s been getting it confused with ‘which.’

“Why?”

“You were out of it during training this morning and you’ve been drowsy. I’m thinking you should get checked out.”

Hunk shakes his head.

“I’m good,” he promises, then elaborates with the bracelet, _“could be side effects from the hormones.”_

Shiro doesn’t look convinced, but he doesn’t try to refute the excuse. Hopefully Hunk’s been careful enough not to give him any reason to.

* * *

The pink ones were consistent. He was the same amount of amped every time, just about.

The white ones never bring Hunk to the zenith he reached the first time, even after weeks of taking them. They bring him a warm reverie, but it’s a little less each time. Maybe if he took more than one, he’d get up to that level of perfection again, but if they’re as expensive as Faeteri claims they are, he can’t be brazenly double dosing.

* * *

When he’s down to his last two, Hunk gives in and takes both in the hopes he’ll get up to the same high the first dose gifted him with.

After this, he won’t take any more. He’ll give them up just like he did the pink ones, cut the cord before any damage can be done. He thinks his friends are starting to pick up on something being amiss. He also needs to stop on the off chance they might interfere with his performance.

* * *

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

These are nothing like the pink ones. Hunk can’t just up and stop.

Not even two full days after taking his last pills, he’s starting to get sick. The cravings are like lampreys on his back, sinking in their teeth and sucking the life out of him. He feels as weak as a kitten and his muscles throb incessantly. Nausea squeezes his stomach and fierce cramps seize his legs.

There’s no way this is going to be better by tomorrow. And it has to be better by tomorrow because there’s a diplomacy function on Shay’s Balmera. Hunk hasn’t seen her in freaking phobes and he can’t let himself be sick for it!

Damn it, why did he do this? Why did he ruin himself with this shit?

He should have known better. He should’ve done better. The pink ones should have taught him that lesson and really, they shouldn’t have had to anyway. He should just know.

Well, now he has to take responsibility. After tomorrow he’ll quit. Tonight he’ll trade and pawn off enough of his stuff to get some pills to tide him over until after the event. Once it’s over, he’ll cut himself off completely.

* * *

Yellow isn’t happy. It feeds Hunk irritation and concern in equal measures and it doesn’t respond to the controls as quickly as it normally does. It’s feeling too fussy and distracted. It doesn’t want to go at all. But Hunk begs and Yellow concedes.

He doesn’t remember where that tent is and he’s too sick to figure it out, so he finds Faeteri first, back under the bleachers. He is startled to see she’s in even worse shape than he is. One half of her face is heavily bandaged, as is the remains of her other right arm. She’s got only two left.

“Hey, Y.P.” She forces a friendly smile.

Hunk is still shocked, agape.

“Yeah,” she mutters, wilting forward. “I got a little blown up.”

Hunk genuinely means to inquire about what happened, but his stomach gives a forceful jolt and he abruptly turns away so he won’t splash her. He bows forward and painfully hurls up a sloppy puddle of chunks and goo.

Faeteri calmly peeks over and regards the mess with a sympathetic wince.

“Pregnant or dopesick?” she teases.

Hunk huffs bitterly.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Lucky for you, I don’t mind sharing.” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a handful of white poppers.

All Hunk can do is restrain himself from snatching them like some fox swiping chicken eggs. He plucks up only two and swallows impatiently. With that, he lets himself collapse to the grass, easing some of the pain in his legs.

 _“Thought you were broke,”_ he types.

“I was, but I had a lot of guns, Y.P. and I sold them all.” she sighs sadly, touching the bandaged stump of her freshly cleaved appendage. “Now that I’m like this, I can’t shoot anymore.”

Hunk gently squeezes her unbound shoulder.

She pops a few pills and stuffs the rest back in her pocket.

“I’m officially useless now.”

_“Don’t say that.”_

“You don’t get it, you’re a paladin.” Faeteri murmurs wistfully. “Your Lion chose you. No one can do your job but you. You’re irreplaceable. But if I can’t do my job, I don’t have a place.”

 _“You could get prosthetics,”_ Hunk suggests, at a loss for how to comfort her.

Faeteri just shakes her head. “I’d have to adjust to them first and relearn to shoot to all over again, let alone get back to my best. No one has time for that when there’s another ten people ready to step up and replace me. Besides, I already spent all my GAC.”

She reaches into her pocket and pulls out another handful of white poppers, holding them out to Hunk.

“Here. I owe you.”

Hunk shouldn’t take them. He told himself he was only going to get a few to tide him over through tomorrow. He needs to ditch this habit before it destroys him.

Hunk disappoints himself more than he thought possible by taking them anyway and putting them into his pack.

Faeteri pops several more into her mouth, gulping hardily.

He stares uneasily but she just shakes her head.

“Look, I’m in serious pain here. This is what they’re supposed to be for. Besides, my tolerance is like gunmetal.”

She seems confident and she knows more about this stuff than he does, so Hunk trusts her. He lies back in the grass and waits for the high to embrace him. His withdrawal symptoms begin abating as the familiar warmth trickles in. He’s starting to realize how deceptive it is.

“Hey,” Faeteri starts, awkwardly crawling closer to him. “I know we’re not lovers or anything, but could you hold me?”

Hunk nods, rolling onto his side to accommodate spooning. Faeteri brightens and lies down, tucking into him. Hunk drapes his arm over her waist, carefully avoiding her injuries.

“Thanks,” she says, breathy. He can tell she’s starting to tear up.

“It’s just been so hard lately, you know?” she whispers, hitching out a sob.

Hunk knows. Hunk knows exactly what she means, and all he can do is give her an empathetic squeeze and hope she finds some solace in being spooned. She chokes back another quiet sob and seems to settle. Hopefully her high’s kicking in.

.  
.  
.

  
Hunk isn’t sure when he nodded off. It’s always bright on this asteroid because of the proximity to its sun, but it was the evening cycle when he left the castle. Faeteri evidently passed out too, she’s still curled up under his arm. And Hunk becomes aware of something wrong.

She’s cool as marble to the touch.

She’s...oh no, no, she's not breathing!

Hunk bolts up immediately, frantic. CPR is his first impulse, but the sight of her petrifies him before he can jump into action.

Her face is bloated like someone who’s gone into anaphylactic shock. Frothy, bilious foam cakes her slackened mouth. Her lime complexion has gone grey and waxy. Her limbs are not relaxed, but stiff and fixed rigidly.

Rigor mortis.

This is beyond resuscitation. 

Hunk doesn’t realize he’s holding his breath. He lets it go and his lungs burn as new air rushes in, and with it, a foul odor. The seat of her pants is soiled with drying excrement.

Faeteri’s been dead for hours. For hours he’s been cuddling her corpse, blissfully unaware in the serenity of dreamland.

Hunk screams. His neglected vocal chords shrivel under the weight of volume they can’t support. Hunk should call someone. Contact somebody from her squadron or maybe go down to the town and see if he can find some help.

And what he does instead, is run.

He stands and he takes off, top speed.

He tears for the Yellow Lion and he never looks back, almost like he can outrun reality.

* * *

“You’re out late again,” Pidge mumbles when she hears Hunk enter the lounge. “I thought you’d go to bed extra early tonight since you get to see your girlfriend tomorrow.”

Hunk doesn’t respond. There’s no room in his head for anything other than what he just left behind on the asteroid belt and even taking one of the whites hasn’t steadied his nerves.

Pidge looks up and frowns at him. “Hey, what is it?”

Hours. He was cuddling Faeteri’s corpse for hours. She expired in his grasp and he didn’t even notice.

“Hunk, why do you look like that? You're starting to scare me.”

Hunk swallows, meets Pidge’s nervous gaze. He almost has a breakdown on the spot, but he turns away and hurries out, running away again.

Maybe it’s subconscious that he flees to the kitchen. The kitchen has always been his go-to spot to work things out. Only there’s no way to bake off the experience of waking up to a corpse in your arms.

Could he have helped her? If he came around sooner? If he didn’t let her take that many?

Fuck no, he realizes. No way he could’ve have done a damn thing for her when he can’t even help himself. She overdosed, she fatally overdosed, and the first thing he did when he hopped in Yellow was take the pill that killed her. He lost control a long time ago and continually failed to acknowledge it. Now the reality has its hands around his throat.

Hunk can barely breathe, he’s hyperventilating again. The image of her corpse brands itself to the back of his eyelids and he can’t un-feel the lifeless chill of her flesh under his arm. He can’t function like this, this is too much.

Hunk is in shambles. He can’t tell his friends what’s been going on because then they’ll get stuck in his tarpit too, but he can’t just pretend nothing is happening anymore! He can not go to the Balmera tomorrow and let Shay see him like this! He can’t play the role of dutiful diplomat and walk around like things are normal, like he didn’t ruin his life and wake up cradling a dead person!

Hunk looks to the stove and realizes he can buy himself some time. This is a last resort, but he’s there, he’s reached that point. He shuffles closer and turns the burner on.

He’ll burn himself bad enough to spend tomorrow in the pod, no more, no less. When he wakes up, he’ll have to deal with everything, but there won’t be nearly as much pressure on him to put up a facade. Hopefully he can gather his strength in the healing cycle, enough strength to tackle his issues by the time he wakes up.

Hunk pushes his hand into the flame.

His skin sizzles and abruptly, an eerie metallic cry keens in the air. His communication bracelet.

Wait, no!

His bracelet is flammable!

Hunk jerks back, but it’s too late. The thing overheats and explodes on his wrist, slivers of shrapnel sent flying. He feels the one that pierces his throat, the sudden spear of intrusion. He can’t actually feel the pain. But he feels the warm wetness of the blood gushing free and knows that it’s bad.

Bad, really bad. He touches it in a daze, pulls his hand back to see it painted red. He needs something to stop that.

Towel?

Yeah, towel now!

Hunk swipes it off the counter and presses it to his throat. It soaks through immediately. Bloody canals travel from his fingertips to drip off his elbow.

Another towel, yeah, two towels.

There aren’t any more already out, so Hunk makes a clumsy grab at the drawer by the sink. He misses. Cherry droplets splatter the chrome.

Things are starting to get blurry, the shape of the drawer obscures as black borders his vision. Hunk makes another dizzy grab for it, and his fingers find the edge.

Somehow he can’t pull.

Droplets, droplets splattering everything.

The room goes upside down and he—

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> VLD takes place in the future so I'm assuming they got control of climate change. Shame there's no indication of that happening in our nonfictional world, eh?


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> References to GoLion, galore. If you've ever read my other fics, you might've caught the refs to other Voltron continuities before, but the following straight up borrows canon (somewhat) from GoLion, so it's not subtle at all.   
>  Edit: Originally posted on the 21st, but I changed it to the 26th to reflect the date it was corrected. Nothing significant was altered but I fixed several typos and awkwardly worded shit that I didn't notice the first time.

You’re supposed to feel better when the healing cycle’s done. But Hunk feels like he got hit by a bus and as the shield of the pod dissipates, the last thing Hunk wants to do is leave. He wants to tuck himself back inside. Wake up, later, maybe. Or maybe not.

Dark expressions rut deep into his teammate’s faces, their postures taut with apprehension. Allura wearily extends a hand and the last thing Hunk wants to do is take it, but he takes it anyway and painstakingly shuffles down the steps. His stomach roils and evidently he’s wearing the way he looks, because Coran holds out a bucket and Hunk gratefully takes it.

“You started withdrawal during the last leg of the healing cycle,” he explains.

Hunk can’t read his tone and he uneasily glances around the other room.

“Yeah,” Lance answers the unspoken question, “we know. Don’t look for your stash, I already trashed it.”

Pidge stands unusually close to him, hands stuffed in her pockets.

Hunk tightens his grip on the bucket.

“Honestly, I’m confused as to how you acquired them in the first place,” Allura says, studying him warily. “Grusulan narcotics are illegal almost everywhere.”

“What she said. Where the hell were you getting these?” Lance demands. “Your Unilu friend?”

Hunk is abruptly assaulted by the images of Faeteri’s rigid corpse and bloated face. He ducks his head into the bucket and vomits.

“Alright, guys,” Shiro sighs tiredly. “Let’s hold off on the questions until he’s settled in.”

Hunk raises his head, bile sour in the back of his throat.

“You’re not off the hook,” Shiro warns, regarding him carefully. “But we can give you a minute to put yourself together.”

Put himself together?

That’s a laugh.

“I’ll take you to your room,” Lance says, stepping forward.

Hunk waves him off and his friend’s stare steels.

“Uh-unh. You’re not brushing me off this time, we can’t trust you alone.”

And Hunk can tell he’s pissed in the way he grabs his forearm and pulls him forward. Further down the hall, Hunk jerks it out of his grasp. Lance shoots him an exasperated look and Hunk holds the bucket tighter in lieu of returning it. His legs are starting to cramp up, and his stomach never stopped churning. He isn’t in the mood to deal with anybody’s shitty attitude, but he also realizes he’s in no position to have one of his own.

In his room, Hunk sets the bucket down and Lance doesn’t venture too far in, just hovers around the door. Is he guarding it?

Like he thinks Hunk might try to escape?

They enter a silent staring contest, sizing each other up. But there are things Hunk doesn’t want Lance to see in him, so he’s the first to fold. He turns tail and ducks into his closet, and the way Lance sighs lets him know his defeat was mistaken for offense.

“I’m mad at myself more than I am at you, okay?” Lance mutters. “You’ve been doing this stuff for awhile. We know that much, cause the pod measured your dependence. And in retrospect it explains a lot. About you. Which is exactly why we should’ve noticed— I should’ve noticed…”

Hunk contemplates this as he throws his clothes on. He doesn’t bother taking the healing suit off first. It’s kind of like an undergarment anyway and he’s cold. Cold and really…not entirely comfortable being exposed. Not anymore. Not even with Lance.

He dusts off his notepad and scrawls.

_Not your fault. I hid it as best I could._

“We noticed things,” Lance says, gesturing vaguely. “Like, with you. But you got tortured, man. You had room to go a little nuts! I just thought what happened changed you. I didn’t realize you’ve been strung out on some alien junk for…for how long?”

And the way Lance looks at him is just plain sad. Like a stuffed animal that got left outside in the rain.

Hunk owes him an answer, but his stomach gives a particularly forceful lurch. He hurries to the bucket and purges, acidic contents burning his throat. He doesn’t know if it’s the withdrawal or being so fresh out of the pod, but he’s suddenly shaking so bad standing’s got him nervous. Hugging the bucket, Hunk backpedals to his bed and sits on the edge.

Sympathy creeps into Lance’s expression, subsuming the remnants of anger.

“Coran says withdrawal is like the flu. It sucks but you’re probably not gonna die.”

Hunk hangs his head, lip curling at the stench rising from the bucket. The repercussions of his bad decisions feel like shackles, but what he was doing was always going to come to an end one way or another. Hunk thinks he always knew this surely, in the back of his mind. It was just another thing he neglected, another in a long list of things he did not have the strength to confront.

It’s over. It never should have began, but now it’s over, and out of all the endings this could have led him to, this is not the worst one. At least he didn’t overdose. Hunk will never be able to scrub away the feeling of her corpse under his arm, the horrible, frigid realization of sheer wrongness. His body knew before his brain did.

He gives into another round of throwing up.

“We should go rinse that out,” Lance says softly, nodding to the bucket. “You need a minute?”

Hunk scowls and sets the thing aside to scrawl another note.

_I’m not going anywhere._

Lance shakes his head. “I can’t just leave you alone. I told you man, we can’t trust you right now. I hate saying that, but it’s true. Two days ago you almost killed yourself.”

Hunk flinches.

_That was an accident._

Lance stares at him closely, as though trying to find deception.

“I want to believe that’s true,” he says eventually.

“It is,” Hunk signs insistently, giving him a pleading look.

“I think it is,” Lance mutters warily. “It looked like an accident. Pidge found a bloody towel by you, like you tried to stop the bleeding. But accident or not, you almost died. What were you trying to do anyway? Just how high were you?”

Nope.

He’s not going there.

Hunk pointedly pushes the notepad aside.

And then Lance comes forward and stoops, a hand on Hunk’s knee. It’s such an out of nowhere gesture that it takes Hunk aback.

“Please don’t shut me out,” he begs. “Not again. I don’t even know you right now and it’s terrifying.”

Hunk slides a hand over Lance’s and squeezes gingerly. He doesn’t have concrete answers for him and he can’t talk about the asteroid belt. Not yet. But he wants to be close again. Hopefully this is a realistic goal.

.  
.  
.

Hunk is violently ill. Maybe even deathly ill, this is infinitely worse than the fucking flu. Who was the genius who came up with that comparison?

Hunk gave up on the bucket a long time ago to camp out in the bathroom instead. He’s had a weak stomach all his life, but he’s never thrown up like this before. His vomit comes in consistent tides. His throat is ravaged from all the acid and his middle throbs from the force of it.

The chill that numbs beneath the skin is cold in the rawest way, like the bite of a bitter arctic wind. He can’t stop shaking no matter how many blankets his friends get for him, which is a lot. They bring him the nice ones even though he’s wretchedly disgusting. Hunk doesn’t think it’s possible he could get more disgusting, he’s so sweaty the perspiration is like a slime on his skin. His nose is running rivers for no reason he can understand, and if he hasn’t puked up Voltron’s bodyweight, he’d be surprised.

It’d be nice if he could suffer his disgusting fate in private, but yeah, no, that’s not happening. Lance was right. His team doesn’t trust him and they will not leave him alone. They take turns hanging around, using just one person at a time, sometimes two. Hunk’s getting too exhausted to keep track of it anyway.

He scarcely scraps together the strength to lift his head from the rim of the toilet bowel and collapse back onto the cushy comforter Coran was nice enough to put on the floor. Lance watches and edges a little closer.

“You, uh, want me to wipe your mouth off?” he asks uneasily.

This isn’t good for Lance, Hunk can tell. Not Pidge either. Neither of them should see him like this. Shiro can take it. Coran too. Allura, probably. Keith, if he were here.

It’s not that Lance and Pidge aren’t tough. They absolutely are. They’ve both got way stronger stomachs than Hunk. But just because they _can_ see this, doesn’t mean they _should._ They already saw Hunk’s torture and they shouldn’t have to see this too.

But Lance is here anyway, and Pidge will inevitably take a shift. There’s nothing Hunk can do to change it, not now. He’s the one who made the oh so intelligent choices that put them in this position. He never should’ve done this to them, he never should’ve done this to himself. He never would’ve touched that crap if he realized it would end up like this.

He does not tell Lance to wipe his mouth off but Lance does so anyway, and then tosses the soiled napkin into the mesh trash bin.

“You need anything?” he asks. “Water? Cold compress?”

Hunk grinds his teeth against the muscle spasms in his leg and curls a fist into the blanket until his knuckles go numb. Lance’s hand lightly drifts over his shoulder. His touch is almost fearful. Hunk closes his fist around the pen and sits up enough to scrawl legibly.

_Remember when I broke my arm?_

“Duh,” Lance huffs, sheepishly tucking his chin it. “It was my fault, kinda.”

Actually, it was totally his fault, as far as Hunk’s concerned. It was their first year at the Garrison and the first time Lance roped him into sneaking out. He wanted to see this space probe up close before it launched, surrounded by a super tall security fence. Hunk tagged along with the intent of doing damage control, should they get caught. Lance could climb like a gecko, the fence wasn’t any problem for him.

But Hunk…not so much.

It was a bad fall. Landed him in this bright, lemon yellow cast for the next ten weeks. Hunk was pretty pissed at Lance at first, almost enough to look into switching roommates. But then Lance started telling everyone he got hurt fighting off a mountain lion. Lance could tell a good story too, made it sound so convincing Hunk almost believed it himself.

That supposed feat of badassery greatly improved Hunk’s otherwise lame reputation as the chunky kid with bad motion sickness. Needless to say, Lance was forgiven.

“Why are you bringing that up now?” Lance blinks owlishly.

_Because it hurts like that, except all over._

The body aches are even worse than the vomiting. Invisible sledgehammers relentlessly pound down on his joints, over and over. Every nonexistent beating splits right down to the marrow and Hunk wants to scream, but his vocal chords are as desiccated as overcooked ramen noodles and his lungs simply don’t have the strength.

A distraught look glimmers in Lance’s eyes. He turns away from Hunk and inhales a measured breath. He is silent for a moment and then comes the question Hunk figured he was going to get asked sooner or later.

“I’m trying to be here for you right now but…man, I still can’t figure it out. How could you do this?”

Hunk lists until his forehead bumps the cool rim of the toilet bowl, unresponsive. He doesn’t really know how to explain it. Struggling with the state his torture left him in just got to be too much. He just wanted to feel better, to be able to handle the new day-to-day challenges without falling apart. And now he’s worse off than he was to begin with.

Lance doesn’t nag him for an answer. He doesn’t even repeat the question. He simply strokes his hand up and down Hunk’s spine, murmuring soothing things when Hunk succumbs to another typhoon of nausea.

  
.  
.  
.

Pidge looks at Hunk like he’s a zombie. He feels like one too. He doesn’t have a speck of energy left, and he finds himself dry retching anyway. Nothing comes up. He’s already brought up everything there was to bring up, but his guts are still writhing in agony.

She wordlessly holds out a water packet. Hunk shakes his head.

“You’re gonna feel worse if you get dehydrated,” she says.

Yeah, but he’s gonna get there either way. If he drinks the water, he’s just going to throw it back up. Hunk refuses the packet with another shake of the head and burrows back into the sweaty blankets. Pidge frowns and puts it away. She pulls her laptop out and works away for awhile, irritating him with the rapid clicks and clacks of her fingers on the keyboard. Hunk doesn’t think he’s ever been this miserable before. He hurts in places he never knew existed and it won’t go away.

He keeps jerking and trembling and sniffling, and he has no control over any of it. He can’t still himself but his body aches with every breath. If he could just sleep it off, he’d take it, but it’s just not happening. Fatigued as he is, he can’t force himself out.

Eventually Pidge grows bored of whatever it is she’s doing on her laptop. She puts it away and props her chin in her hands, peering at him closely. It looks like she wants to say something.

 _What?_ he writes.

“Where did you go that night?”

Oh.

No, no, not going there.

Hunk stifles a gag and rolls over to face the wall. And he is shocked as Pidge’s fingers suddenly, forcefully grab his shoulder. She grips like a vise and yanks him toward her.

“You almost died with your head in my lap, asshole!” she fumes, and there’s a fire in her voice but her lip is quivering. “Do you even realize what you did to me?”

And Hunk falters, caught off guard.

Pidge lets go of him and rocks forward, sucking in a breath.

“The way you looked when you came back scared the crap out of me. So I ran after you, and then…there was blood everywhere and you wouldn’t wake up and I couldn’t carry you, and even if I could, I probably wouldn’t because blood was shooting out of your throat!”

Hunk’s mouth goes dry.

“I held it back as best I could,” she mumbles, looking down at her hands. Hunk follows her gaze and realizes he can see stains under her nails. Rusty crescents, rusty cuticles. Blood stains.

Guilt crawls over him like a big hairy insect.

“I don’t think I’ve ever screamed that much,” she finishes, exhaling heavily. “So tell me why you put me through that, Hunk. That’s it. No judgement, I just need to know why.”

Hunk gives in. He sits up and takes the pen and scrawls, even though it makes him feel sick.

_My friend died._

“Friend,” Pidge repeats like she’s testing the word. “Somebody you got high with?”

Hunk solemnly nods.

“That’s not your friend,” she mutters, giving him a stern look. “We’re your friends. If you were that messed up, you should’ve come to us.”

Hunk worries his lip between his teeth. He gets where she’s coming from, but she doesn’t get it. And it’s not her fault, because it’s not like he ever put in the effort to explain anything to any of them.

 _I needed a friend who didn’t know me before what happened. Someone I couldn’t disappoint_.

“Oh.” Pidge’s gaze dims, soft and sad. “I’m sorry if I made you feel like that. Like I was disappointed. I think I was, sometimes…not in you, but for you.”

Hunk nods.

_Sorry I almost died in your lap._

Pidge smiles weakly. “I forgive you.”

Hunk gives her finger guns, and then hunches back over the toilet to do some more dry retching.

  
.  
.  
.

Hunk still can’t sleep and everything is worse.

It must be late because even Pidge is passed out, against the wall with her head lolled onto her shoulder and glasses askew. He tried to sleep, he knows he’s tired. He keeps yawning and he’s painfully exhausted. He feels as spent as an ox logging weight under the sun.

Nonetheless, he is wide awake.

He is awake and everything hurts, everything hurts impossibly worse than it did earlier. His entire body is throbbing and the cravings are roaring. Hunk tries to fight them off and they only roar louder. They hook claws into his insides like voracious demons and Hunk finds himself possessed. Lance threw out his stash, but maybe he could go get some more. Somewhere. At least now he knows what they’re called, Grusulan something.

Not…not a lot of them, of course not. That would be crazy.

But maybe just one. Just one, or even a half of one, just to shut up these horrible cravings and ease the bone-shattering pains.

He could probably sneak away. As long as he’s fast. Just to get one. Or a half. No more than that, just a little bit to wean himself off. It’s not like he consented to this cold turkey shit anyway.

This is reasonable, isn’t it?

At least back on Earth, you weren’t just supposed to up and quit taking medication anyway. Right?

Hunk quietly rises to his feet and exits as quietly as possible so he doesn’t disturb Pidge. He slinks away, down the hall. His stomach feels like it’s competing in an obstacle course, but he holds it gingerly and refrains from retching.

When he passes the training deck, he can hear Shiro and Allura talking inside. Apparently they’re still up. Their voices are unmistakable even if he can’t make out exactly what they’re saying. And with that, Hunk tries to be extra quiet.

It isn’t until he’s made it to Yellow’s hanger that he realizes something important.

He needs money.

Or at least something to trade.

He’s never had to buy any of these himself, so he doesn’t know how much GAC they cost, but Faeteri claimed they were expensive. He jolts when he thinks of her and almost reconsiders. But the cravings roar like territorial tigers and his own voice of reason perishes under them.

Allura’s room isn’t far from here.

Allura has a lot of jewelry.

  
.  
.  
.

Hunk stares at Allura’s open jewelry box, holding his breath until his lungs burn. If he wasn’t a tarpit before, he’s definitely one now. How could he even consider this?

Well, because it hurts, the cravings rationalize. Besides, she’s a princess. Her jewelry box is so full it’s almost overstuffed. She’d never even know if he took something small.

That’s all he needs, something small. One of the gemstones on her opulent choker. Or that pinkie ring with a tricolor band. A shiny studded earring. It’s not like he needs to take something she’ll miss.

And besides, once he’s better, he’ll replace it. He’ll get her something new, something even nicer.

Hunk doesn’t want to do this. He doesn’t want to take anything from anyone, but he just needs to get through tonight. And getting through tonight is impossible if he’s completely cut off. He can’t do this cold turkey, every fiber of his being is getting shredded.

His heart twists in dissent and Hunk takes a necklace anyway. It has a chain so thin it’s almost like a strand of hair, and a reddish flower charm hangs from it. It’s one of the subtler pieces in the box. Definitely not flashy. She probably won’t notice its absence, since it doesn’t stand out nearly as much as her other glamorous pieces.

Hunk starts toward the door and almost makes it over the threshold when his conscience pierces through the cravings.

He is disgusting. He is disgusting and it has nothing to do with his unfortunate bodily secretions or vomit breath. He actually snuck into Allura’s room with the intent to swipe her jewelry, and if he walks out of her room with it, then…then he doesn’t even deserve to be here.

Withdrawal sucks. Right now it feels like the worst thing he’s ever gone through, but it really isn’t. Hunk was tortured. Brutally, mercilessly tortured. And if he survived that, he can survive this. He doesn’t need any more of that shit, and he never, ever should’ve let himself think he did. Especially not enough so to do something like this.

Hunk turns around and shuffles back to the jewelry box. He opens it and just when he’s about to return the necklace, a sharp gasp from behind makes him jump.

Hunk whirls around, blood freezing as he meets Allura’s wide eyes. She spots the necklace in his grasp and the shock in her gaze turns to rage. She stomps over and nearly tears his hand off getting it back. She clutches it to her chest as though she’s been struck.

“This was a birthday gift from Saint,” she seethes, temper scathing in every syllable. “Coran’s son.”

_Oh._

Oh fuck.

Hunk begins to sign an apology and Allura is having none of it. She all but snarls at him.

“You’re despicable! Thieving my personal belongings, so you can run off and poison yourself!? Who are you right now?!”

Hunk holds his hands up, scrambling for how to defend himself. This looks so bad. She walked in at the worst possible moment. He was going to put it back. He had made up his mind to put it back, for sure, no ifs ands or buts about it. But he has no idea how to express this to Allura and she doesn’t give him the time to anyway.

She hotly shoulders him out of the way and returns the necklace to the jewelry box. She snaps the lid closed and she does not turn around.

“Get out of here, Hunk,” she demands, and while her tone is forceful, she suddenly sounds more hurt than angry. “I can’t look at you.”

Hunk flinches and obediently shuffles to the door. The mice watch, chittering nervously from Allura’s bureau, Chulatt hiding behind Platt. He hadn’t noticed them earlier, but he hopes they’ll comfort Allura. He almost did the worst thing ever, Hunk wouldn’t blame her if she never spoke to him again.

* * *

Hunk doesn’t know when day one of withdrawal ends and day two begins. He never ends up getting to sleep. He spends the night pacing and aching and contemplating bashing his head into the wall. Knock himself out, send himself into painless darkness. But poor Pidge doesn’t need to wake up to more of his blood on the floor so he holds himself back.

Not that her waking up to the sounds of him violently dry retching is much of a step above. Blinking the sleep out of her eyes, Pidge pushes up and rinses a rag in the sink. She holds it to the back of his neck and the droplets roll onto his skin. They feel like beads of oil sizzling on a hot griddle. He feels feverish but it’s just one crappy feeling of many vying for his attention. The aches and pains are still in the lead. Insomnia is in second place. And the constant, intensifying nausea takes the bronze.

What a race.

When the unproductive surge of nausea subsides, Hunk rests his cheek on the rim and tries to catch his breath.

“That’s a pretty gross pillow,” Pidge teases, smiling weakly.

And if Hunk didn’t feel like he took a full body trip down the garbage disposal, maybe he’d smile back. Pidge doesn’t seem to take it personally. She drapes one of the blankets over his shoulder and idly tells him about this dream she had. It’s pretty convoluted and Hunk would be totally invested if he were feeling better. As is, he doesn’t follow but still appreciates her efforts to distract him.

“…then Baebae was the Pepperoni Paladin of the pizza Voltron, and we were able to defeat the Anchovy Army. So now I’m craving calzones.”

“Will space goo do for now?” Shiro asks, poking his head in.

“Guess it’ll have to.” Pidge shrugs and stands up, lacing her fingers and stretching her arms over her head.

“You should come have some too.” Shiro shoots Hunk a look.

Hunk shakes his head. Goo doesn’t taste any better the second time and he knows if he chokes any down right now, all it’s going to do is come up again.

“You’ve gotta have something.” Pidge says, dropping her arms. “You can’t take your hormones on an empty stomach. And you need to keep taking them. You’ll withdrawal from that too, if you stop. Not as bad as this, but still. You don’t want to go there, do you?”

Ugh. He knows she has a point but he just can’t deal with that right now. Not the food, not the hormones, not eating at the breakfast table across from Allura and all the fury she justifiably has to hurl at him.

“Later,” he signs.

Pidge sternly plants her hands on her hips but before she can lecture, Shiro steps in.

“Go on ahead,” he says, patting her shoulder. “We’ll catch up with you.”

Pidge glances up to him, seems a little doubtful even though she nods. She slips out of the bathroom and Shiro hunkers down across from him.

“How’re you feeling?”

 _Gross,_ Hunk scrawls.

“I could get you something to change into if you want to shower. Might feel less gross if you clean up.”

Hunk thinks about it.

“The hot water would probably help with the body aches,” Shiro adds.

The idea would’ve held more appeal yesterday, when he had the chills. Right now he already feels too hot and while it probably would be nice to get clean, it would also take effort. To wash up, to stand there. And why change into something more presentable when he knows, without a doubt, that he’s inevitably going to spend most of the day in this claustrophobic room, throwing up or just on the edge of it?

“Later,” he signs again.

“Alright,” Shiro says neutrally. Hunk can’t tell if he’s disappointed or not. “Then I guess we’ll just hang out for a bit.”

_You don’t have to stay here. I won’t leave._

Shiro inclines his head with a short, almost frustrated sigh. “You should understand why I can’t take your word for it.”

And the guilt that jumps into Hunk’s throat is almost smothering. He peels himself away from the toilet and sits back to write properly, dry lips pressing together.

_I didn’t mean for it to get as bad as it did._

“I should’ve seen it. The weight loss, the mood swings.” Shiro shakes his head. “You were hyperactive all the time, then you were lethargic all the time, never any in between. I should’ve seen it. And I think the reason I didn’t see it, is because it’s the last thing I would’ve expected from you. Do you want to tell me how this started?”

Hunk doesn’t want to think about it. But he thinks about it anyway, because there is nothing else to do in this claustrophobic room, pinned by Shiro’s saddened gaze. So he thinks about it and losing Kythra, yeah, that was when he finally threw in the towel, decided, yeah, fuck it all, and had his fun with F—

And he can’t even think about her without his stomach jolting. But Hunk’s thinking even if he didn’t meet her, maybe he would’ve pulled away and found this shit himself. And it wasn’t drinking with Matt, either, he thinks he had this potential before that. Because nothing else was working and maybe he wasn’t trying hard enough, but it felt like he didn’t have anything left inside to try with, it felt like that all the time and he was just so done. Done with himself, and that’s the thought that hits the nail on the head because he knows exactly where he went so wrong he made everything else wrong too.

Shiro is still looking at him and Hunk gives in, submitting to the honesty.

 _I bit my tongue off,_ he writes and his heart pangs with the memory, _Vaqnak didn’t cut it out._

Shiro’s eyes widen.

_I did it so I wouldn’t talk, but it was a mistake. My choice was talk, or get force fed my own parts. And as sick as it is, I think I should’ve just eaten them because they were already ruined. Already gone. I could’ve gotten away with my tongue but I bit it off and within the hour, you guys came for me._

Hunk swallows hard as he showcases the notepad. It’s excruciatingly embarrassing and yet something of a relief to admit. It’s the first time he’s admitted it to himself, really. It was a waste of a sacrifice that he didn’t have to make. Sure, it’d would’ve been cowardly to choke down his own nuts, the very epitome of emasculation.

But more often than not, the cowardly thing is also the pragmatic thing. The second they got severed, there was no getting them back. His tongue, on the other hand, would’ve been unscathed if he would’ve actually thought about it, instead of making the hasty decision to just…just up and mangle himself. He could’ve kept his mouth shut chowing down on what he already lost instead of costing himself something else. If he could’ve held out for just a little bit longer, he would’ve been saved with speaking, singing, and tasting in tact.

He supposes he can take some comfort in the fact that he didn’t talk, that those humans are safe because he kept his mouth shut in the most extreme of ways. But it’s such an abstract, distant comfort when he’s living in there here and now, struggling with the repercussions of all these terrible decisions.

Shiro suddenly looks like he’s in pain, same look he has when he’s stoically bearing battle wounds. Hunk doesn’t know why. Shiro has seen uglier things. Probably done them too.

“None of that ever should’ve happened to you,” he states softly. “You did something drastic in a lose-lose situation, Hunk. You can’t torture yourself about what might’ve been different if you'd…done something else. It happened the way it happened. You can’t blame yourself for it. You can’t fly off the handle because you blame yourself for it, either.”

They could dig deeper but Hunk doesn’t care to, or have the energy for it. He doesn’t even want to sit up all that much anymore, so he sinks to the floor and rests his head on a corner of blanket. His stomach gives an uneasy roll and Hunk shuts his eye against the sensation.

“Do you hear me?” Shiro asks, almost reproachful.

Hunk nods.

“I mean it. Don’t do that to yourself, it’s just going to hold you back. You want to move forward.”

Hunk gives another slow nod. He’s shaking again and it makes everything hurt more than it already does, knives stabbing into his marrow with every unintended jolt of his limbs. Shiro gets up just to plop down closer to him, and rests a gentle metal hand on his shoulder.

“Withdrawal is pretty crappy, huh?”

Understatement of the century.

“You might be more comfortable back in bed,” Shiro suggests.

Hunk blinks his eye open and shakes his head. If he does start getting violently sick again, he doesn’t want to make a mess there. It would take forever to get the smell out. Besides, the cool metal of the bathroom floor is somewhat comforting.

“I’ll give you an hour before you have to eat, okay?”

Hunk glowers.

Shiro at least has the decency to look sympathetic. “It can be something light, but it has to be something. You have medication to take and you need to keep your strength up.”

What strength? The cravings already devoured it all.

Some sweat catches in his eyelashes and Hunk wipes it out, irritated. Shiro watches, frowning. He rests the back of his flesh hand to Hunk’s cheek and winces.

“I didn’t realize you were burning up that bad. I don’t know if that’s normal or not.”

“Probably is,” Hunk signs tiredly.

“I’d rather know for sure,” Shiro decides. “Come on, let’s go to the med bay.”

Ha. Yeah, not happening.

“No.”

“It’s not going to hurt to double check,” Shiro says.

Except it is, because everything hurts! Moving makes it hurt more!

Hunk sits up enough to write.

_You can’t make me move._

And maybe he’s being childish but he feels too shitty to care.

Shiro raises a brow, like he’s considering the challenge.

But no, there’s no way. Hunk’s lost a good heap of fat and even muscle too, but he’s still biggish. Still bigger than Shiro, right? He can’t be forced anywhere he doesn’t want to go and now the only place he wants to be is this bathroom floor, as pathetic as it sounds.

Shiro proves him wrong. He rises to the occasion, hooking his arms under Hunk’s and dragging him away.

  
.  
.  
.

Coran looks him over, and all the while Hunk can’t help thinking about this new information he now knows about him. It’s actually easy to picture Coran as a father, but filling in the other blanks is uncomfortable. Disheartening.

Hunk can’’t help wondering what his family looked like. Allura specifically mentioned a son as being the one who got her that necklace, maybe he had siblings. Saint, was it? Well, how old was he? Was Coran married?

Hunk’s always been a curious person. The type to snoop and not really be shy about it. He doesn’t think there’s any shame in being interested in other people’s lives and idiosyncrasies, particularly if you’re going to be spending a lot of time with them.

“The fever’s higher than I’d expect, but that might be because you’re dehydrated,” Coran murmurs, slightly concerned. “Your pod scans gave us an estimate of how long you’d been on the Grusulan narcotics, over a third of a deca-phoeb. Do you confirm?”

Hunk nods, figuring that’s about right.

He’s not going to ask any questions. This was information he wasn’t supposed to know, and he only knows it because he was going to screw over a friend and take off to…well, what Allura called him out on. Self-poisoning. There are things people don’t like to talk about and now that Hunk himself is painfully aware of that, he’s beginning to think snooping was never okay to begin with. He was just oblivious. 

“Now, your blood pressure and your heart rate are also increased beyond what I’d call normal, but I don’t see any reason to consider it dangerous unless you give me one. Experienced any chest pains?”

Hunk shakes his head.

“Shortness of breath?”

Other than gasping after particularly brutal rounds of purging his guts, no, so Hunk shakes his head again.

“You’re probably okay on that front, then.” Coran gives him a weary smile.

Hunk wonders if his kid looked like him. Did they have the same mustache? Fuck, was his kid old enough to grow a mustache?

Sure, theoretically he’d be Allura’s age but it’s not the kind of thing you can just assume. It’s not like everyone has kids at the same time. There’s always people who have kids older or younger than you’d expect. Hunk’s brother started scarcely older than he is right now and his aunt surprised everybody getting pregnant for the first time at forty-four.

“You haven’t slept, have you?”

Hunk gives another head shake.

“That might explain some things too,” Coran says. “Unfortunately, your tolerance is too high for anything I have to give you for it. It would be ineffective.”

Hunk figured as much, and he wouldn’t ask for anything anyway.

“But I can help you rehydrate,” Coran offers. “That might lessen some discomfort.”

Hunk remembers when Pidge got dehydrated after spending some time on a particularly arid planet. So he’s pretty sure he remembers what rehydrating entails when you can’t do it yourself.

 _That means shots, doesn’t it?_ he scrawls.

Shiro reads it aloud for Coran, and Coran nods.

“Orally rehydrating you would take longer and since you’re still experiencing nausea, you might not be able to keep enough down anyway.”

Damn it. Shots make Hunk queasy. Watching the long point of the needle just disappear into his skin. The gross blood bubble that rises up when it gets pulled out. Even watching other people get shots gives him the heebie jeebies.

“It’s a good idea,” Shiro says, giving Hunk a pointed look.

_Can I hide my face in your shirt?_

Hunk is fully aware that he’s too old to ask something like that. He’s thinking he’s hovering at the two decade mark, if he’s not there already. And most kids get over their hangup on shots by the time they’re in middle school. He’s a paladin and he’s seen tons of things scarier than shots, so they definitely shouldn’t bother him as much as they do.

But even though they shouldn’t, they do, and Hunk is very grateful when Shiro nods. He tucks his face into Shiro’s chest and Shiro kindly cups the back of his neck. He holds his arm still for Coran, which is a lot easier to do when he’s not looking. The tiny stings that follow are a bit of a nuisance, but for some reason, feeling needles isn’t remotely as unsettling as watching them.

  
.  
.  
.

Getting hydrated does improve things a marginal degree. Hunk still feels like garbage, but like better garbage. He’s upgraded from feeling like the sludge in a disposal drain to feeling like litter discarded on the side of the highway.

Shiro shepherds him to the kitchen and keeps an eye on things as Hunk dutifully gulps down half a bowl of goo and his hormone capsule. After the fact, he takes Shiro’s earlier advice and hops in the shower.

Showering does not go as smoothly as eating.

Hunk has not showered sober in a long time. It was easier to confront his exposure on the pinks, when he was moving like a flurry and intensely focused on manically washing. It was easier when he’d daringly pop a red for a night shower and the water droplets were always glimmering angel kisses, and the water stream was silk even long after it went cold. Easier on the whites, because everything was easier on the whites.

When he’s clear-headed, he just has to deal with the painful presence of that prominent absence and particularly heinous scars. And his new, somewhat flatter shape is weird. It didn’t really bother him before, he barely noticed while it was happening, but he can’t get away from it naked.

Hunk’s always been big. Always. And it’s not like that doesn’t come without challenges, because there’s always superficial assholes, clothes that don’t fit right, that irritating assumption that he’s into food because of his size and not because he recognizes its significance in culture or camaraderie. In spite of this, he’s always been comfortable with himself as large.

Pretty much everybody on his dad’s side of the family is big. The dudes are blubbery beefcakes and the ladies are plus-sized powerhouses. It’s hereditary, and come puberty, the muscle that arrived to back up the fat solidly scared anybody off from saying anything bogus about it.

It’s not always easy being big, but easy or not, it’s something Hunk’s always been and now that he’s barely biggish, it just…isn’t right. He doesn’t feel like himself anymore and he doesn’t look like himself either. He is a soured stranger in an out-of-sorts shape and he misses being himself, both inside and out.

Hunk isn’t exactly sure when he begins sobbing in the shower. The water masks it until he starts making these awful animal sounds that he can’t choke back. His vocal chords are freaking shredded from lack of use, and these noises don’t sound anything like the way he used to sound and this just distressed him more. He doesn’t look, feel, or even sound like himself.

Hunk isn’t sure if he is himself. Maybe he died in that room, and his friends just scraped up the leftovers in their overdue rescue.

Except Hunk can’t let that be true. Because Lance killed for him. He won’t let that kind of sacrifice be for nothing, nothing but some leftovers. He’s still himself, somewhere. He just has to get through the withdrawal and…and this withdrawal is pure torture. Leftovers couldn’t get through something like that. But he can, he suddenly, powerfully believes that he can, even as his gut leaps into his throat and he abruptly purges some syrupy goo.

It swirls down the drain, cloudy green.

Hunk hears the bathroom door open. Evidently his episode was loud.

“You okay?” Lance asks.

There is a brief, awkward pause as he must realize Hunk hasn’t exactly mastered answering questions at a distance.

“Knock once if you’re good, twice if you need help,” Lance calls.

Mm, that works well enough. Hunk knocks once.

“Okay.”

He hears the door slide closed. And then Hunk slides too, against the wall until he’s sitting at the bottom of the gourd-shaped Altean shower. He doesn’t put any effort into washing up. Cleaning up is something he’ll work on tomorrow. Right now, he just appreciates the relief hot water brings to his riddling aches.

  
.  
.  
.

Hunk returns to the bathroom floor after his shower and gets in a nap that’s almost a varga. He’s irritated when he wakes up because it wasn’t nearly long enough and it was a fitful, shallow drowse. He wants to go down hard, damn it. A good, solid sleep.

Lance hangs out with him for a little bit longer. He asks Hunk to help him rank his selfies so he can establish an unbiased top ten, and Hunk humors him mostly just to have the distraction. But eventually Lance heads off to do some training. Hunk knows someone else is going to take over because he is still not trusted to mind himself, but he does not expect that person to be Allura.

The warmth in her eyes eaves with Lance, but she is more phlegmatic than openly hostile. Hunk doesn’t know how to respond. Should he try to apologize again?

Allura leans back against the sink, gaze never leaving him. Hunk almost feels like he’s being measured up. Without a word, she opens the high collar of her dress. The necklace he almost took accentuates the elegant column of her throat. She calmly reaches back and undoes the clasp, its thin chain going slack.

Taking it off, Allura crouches across from him. She lifts Hunk’s hand and drops the necklace in his palm. She closes his fingers over it, trapping the treasure in his grasp. Her gaze locks on his.

“If you leave, I will not stop you,” she says cooly. “If you so choose, you can take that and go, and poison yourself to your heart’s content.”

Allura rises to her feet again, eyes as sharp as talons.

Hunk traces the flower charm with the pad of his thumb. He stands up and without any hesitation at all, brushes her hair out of the way. He replaces the necklace so the charm rests over her breastbone and secures the clasp with a tiny metallic click.

With that, he moves away and plops back onto his blanket pile.

Allura releases a measured breath. Hunk expects her to leave. She doesn’t. She sits down across from him on the bathroom floor, skirt wrinkling against the tile.

“The mice said you were going to put it back,” she murmurs. “I wanted to believe them, but I needed to see for myself.”

That’s fair. Hunk gives a sheepish smile he hopes conveys as much, swallows back a bitter taste.

“You still hurt me,” she admits, fingering at the charm. “Raiding through my things, seizing something so precious to me, all to…”

Allura trails off, tongue briefly flicking over her lips.

“You didn’t actually do it. And I checked, so I know you didn’t take anything else either.”

“I’m sorry,” Hunk signs.

Allura acknowledges with a slight incline of the head. “Were you to take it, I doubt you would’ve gotten much. This is costume jewelry, Hunk, yet I still would’ve preferred you to take everything else.”

The look on her face sends a knife through his heart and Hunk apologies again, twice, fingers clumsy as his stomach wrenches.

“I forgive you,” she promises wearily. “You forgave me for my notoriously ill-timed lapse in stamina. In that sense, I suppose I’m partly responsible for this to begin with.”

Hunk halts her with a gesture, vehemently shaking his head. No way. Nothing she did has anything to do with this, nothing any of his friends did has anything to do with this. He takes responsibility for himself.

“But—Mmph!”

Hunk silences Allura with a finger to her lips. He isn’t going to let her entertain any ideas like that.

Shoulders slackening, she moves his hand away.

“Okay,” she says tentatively.

Hunk pats her knee and leans back.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to return to your room?”

Hunk nods.

Allura seems dubious. “Then is there anything else I can do to make you more comfortable here?”

Hunk shrugs. Magically banishing his symptoms is the only thing he can thing of, but it’s not something she can actually do. Unless she’s holding out on him, but if so, Allura is a much better actresses than what her performance in the Voltron Show would suggest.

“My father used to tell me stories when I didn’t feel well,” Allura says, hands folding in her lap. “I remember most of them.”

Hunk huffs a soft sigh and sweeps his hand up in an easy, prompting motion.

Who doesn’t like stories?

  
.  
.  
.

  
“You’re trembling rather harshly,” Allura murmurs, vaguely apprehensive.

Yeah, and it’s totally not something Hunk needed her to point out for him. He’s still in the thick of it and cold again, and gritting his teeth because there’s nothing else to do but bear it.

“Would you like me to hold you?”

It’s such an innocent question that comes from a good place, but it hits him the wrong way. It sounds too much like the last question he was asked before he woke up with a corpse in his arms. Grotesque, vivid imagery springs to his head and Hunk even feels it, feels her, the deathly coolness and the rigidity that told him everything.

The next thing he knows, he’s hyperventilating. It feels like the weight of an occupied coffin crushing his chest, and he can’t catch his breath.

“What’s wrong?” Allura asks, hand light on his shoulder.

Even if he knew how to answer her question, he doesn’t know how he could. His communicator exploded and it’s not like he knows enough nonverbal Altean to describe the way a cadaver feels when you’re cuddling it midway through the fresh stage.

It was fresh, right? Not bloat?

There’s five stages, Hunk doesn’t know them all by heart, but he does know that _his_ heart is about to burst from his chest like a pilot ejecting out of an aircraft amidst imminent crash. He feels like he’s crashing, a mess in motion as panic gobbles up his guts.

Is it just Hunk or is the room shrinking?

He claws a hand into his shirt, digging at the tightness he feels beneath it. He’s been sweating off and on today, but all of sudden, it’s like perspiration is gushing out of his pores in waterfalls.

“Okay,” Allura decides, eyes worried but voice calm and clear. “Let’s get you out of here. You’re alright, Hunk, just don’t thrash.”

Hunk doesn’t thrash, he just curls up tight and tries not to vomit as Allura picks him up. She keeps talking to him, but all he can hear is the shallow, rapid panting of his own breath. He can barely think around the sound, past the pain, or through the horrible images in his head.

This is a heart attack, isn’t it?

Fuck, he’s having a heart attack!

Hunk doesn’t know how to explain this too Allura, if it’s possible to do so while she’s carrying him. A torrent of panicked thoughts tears through his head like a tempest, all of them some variation of the horror that comes will realizing he’s having a heart attack. Oh god, he’s gonna die.

He’s having a heart attack and he’s going to die in Allura’s grasp, but at least she’ll notice. She won’t be unaware and they’ll probably preserve his cadaver in a cryo-pod and he’ll get some kind of funeral. He won’t get abandoned on some random asteroid, left to rot in the sun and get picked at by extraterrestrial scavengers.

  
.  
.  
.

  
Except it’s not, and the way it actually goes down is far different than the vision of exceptional morbidity his traumatized brain conjured up for him.

“He’s had panic attacks before?” Coran asks Lance.

Hunk normally gets irritated when people speak for him, particularly when they take it upon themselves to do so. But this isn’t like that. It’s an intervention that he appreciates because he’s so rattled his heart is still skipping beats and he’s more exhausted than he ever thought possible. At the moment, Hunk does not particularly care for communication or the hassle that comes with it, so he’s more than willing to go along with somebody else doing it for him.

“Yeah, but that was the first one in awhile. As far as I know, anyway.” Lance gives him a searching look.

Hunk blinks at him and sips at his water packet, trying not to be blank.

“I get them too sometimes.” Shiro offers him a sympathetic smile and squeezes his shoulder.

Shiro doesn’t like admitting to things like that, just by doing so, he’s putting in an effort. And Hunk figures he’s supposed to engage with that, or a least give acknowledgement, but he still can’t work himself into the moment. He’s out of it, vaguely anxious for no outstanding reason. Maybe lingering guilt. He’s got a lot of that.

“You’re not in any danger,” Coran reassures and Hunk gets the idea it is not the first time he’s been told this. “But you’re welcome to stay here, of course. Do you have any concerns?”

Probably, somewhere. Floating out of reach. Right now it’s too much to think about, so Hunk just shakes his head and places his water packet on the tray. His hands are still shaking uncontrollably. Pidge notices. She climbs onto the cot and covers them with hers. Her hands may be small, but somehow they’re strong enough to still the shaking in his own.

“You need a minute, huh?” she murmurs, but it’s not really a question.

Hunk numbly nods.

He doesn’t know what to make out of it. The panic attack. Like Lance said, he’s had them before. For the most part, he’d just get them out of the blue. But this one doesn’t feel like it was out of the blue, and while he never feels good after having one, this one pillaged every iota of fortitude he had to get through the day.

Maybe it’s because he was flagging to begin with. His friends talk around him, about him probably, but Hunk doesn’t even have the energy to pay attention.

* * *

The third day is the worst day. Hunk is insomnia’s prisoner. His whole body is cracking into pieces, bones ground to shards and muscles endlessly shrieking around them. He can barely walk because he feels like he’s standing on a sailboat in storming seas. He and nausea go back a long way, but he doesn’t remember it ever being this viscously relentless.

Hunk is shaking so hard that Allura just takes it upon herself to hold him, and while he’s relieved she doesn’t ask again, it’s sort of awkward because he knows he’s making her gross. Her dress has got to be absorbing his deluge of sweat like a sponge.

Lance too, gets down on the floor with him. During his particularly violent paroxysms, Lance lets him squeeze his hand. That can’t be the best idea. Even though Hunk’s not trying to hurt him, in these moments, his gentlest grip is a bruising force. But Lance bears it with the tenderest look in his eyes and with his free hand, strokes some of Hunk’s hair back into place.

Hunk’s got a lot of love coming toward him, and it’s probably the only thing that keeps him from drowning in vomit and toilet water.

* * *

The fourth day is an improvement. Hunk feels like he got hit by a bike instead of a bus. He eats breakfast with his team, much to their surprise. He takes a shower and this time, actually puts in the effort to scrub himself. Showering is still uncomfortable and it probably will be for a very long time, but neglecting his hygiene is more uncomfortable and right now Hunk doesn’t think he’s ever been grungier.

Shiro helps him wash and fold his bathroom nest blankets. Hunk is still nauseous today, but much less so. He returns to his room and sleeps his way into day five.

* * *

Day five, Hunk can’t say that he feels good, exactly. But he doesn’t feel sick anymore. He makes milkshakes, much to everybody else’s delight.

He showers again and scrubs again, because it’s going to take at least a week of scrubbing to get off all of the accumulated grunge. Sudsy bubbles pop between his fingers and the minty smell gives him something pleasant to focus on. There are pleasant things to focus on in the shower. There will always be pleasant things to focus on in the shower, like minty bubbles or comforting heat, and it’s good for him to remember this whenever the uncomfortable parts vie for his attention.

Lance still waits for him outside. Hunk is pretty sure this is going to be happening for awhile. And yes, it’s really freaking annoying, but he also understands. He broke his team’s trust and it’s going to take some time to earn it back. If following him around is all they’re going to do, it’s actually a pretty good turnout.

Especially where Allura is concerned.

“It’s our secret,” she promises when Hunk inevitably asks if she’s going to tell everybody else about what he almost did. “On one condition…”

Hunk raises a brow.

“You train with me when you’re feeling up to it.” Allura grins.

Fully knowing she’s going to kick his ass, Hunk grins back and gives her a thumbs up.

* * *

Keith is around the next day. Kolivon and Allura are going over some stuff amongst themselves. Hunk is pretty sure there’s a mission around the corner, but they haven’t been briefed on anything yet. He feels pretty decent today. He isn’t experiencing any symptoms anymore, but he’s still a little weary from the whole ordeal.

“Hey,” Keith greets, casually waving.

Hunk hasn’t seen him in a long time, and the past few days have felt like centuries within themselves. Smiling, he cuts the short gap between them and lifts him in a hug.

“Whoa, okay.” Keith huffs a sound of surprise and slowly hugs him back. “I missed you too.”

Hunk gives him a good squeeze and then gingerly returns him to the floor.

“You doing okay now?” he asks, and Hunk can see in his eyes that he knows.

He self-consciously rubs at the back of his neck and then slips the notepad out of his pocket.

_I’m sorry I lied before._

“I’m not mad,” Keith sighs, shrugging. “Or I guess I am, but not at you. I should’ve said something to someone else. If you were feeling messed up enough to get into something, it’s not like I should’ve expected you to come clean on the spot.”

_But I should’ve been honest._

“I mean, yeah, you should’ve.” Keith crosses his arms. “But the most important thing is that you’re okay. You okay?”

_Pretty okay. Shiro wants to talk to me to him about things once a week._

“That’s good. Shiro talked to me a lot when I was struggling with things too. He’s not the best at taking care of himself, but he always wants to take care of everybody else.”

_It’s frustrating, but I appreciate him._

Keith smiles softly. “What else is new?”

_Gotta meet Pidge and Lance for a Demonsphere date. You in?_

“Uh…” Keith frowns. “It’s been awhile. I don’t really remember how to play.”

_I’ll teach you._

Hunk pats him on the back and then leads him off before he can refuse. Pidge and Lance are happy to see Keith, and even happier to tease him for being such a noob. Keith takes it well, all things considered.

Later, Hunk makes everybody a round of milkshakes just because he can. The whipped cream and space cherries probably make them the most inappropriate beverage for a serious mission briefing, but Kolivon seems to like them anyway.

Hunk’s night ends on his promised training session with Allura. She seems particularly gleeful about unleashing her prowess on him and Hunk isn’t sure if it’s because she’s excited to be hanging out again or if it’s because she’s still feeling miffed about the necklace thing.

Either way, things are really looking up. And Hunk’s not just thinking that because he’s literally looking up, the ceiling in view as Allura knocks his ass to the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry bout the red herring in the previous chapter. So this is over! Probably. There might be a short epilogue chapter but the actual story part is over, so I'm marking it completed. If I do add the epilogue part, again, it will be very short and kinder than the rest of this. 
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> So all in all, I think I've traumatized Hunk enough for once...now it's time to go traumatize Allura :')

**Author's Note:**

> I use comment moderation on any fic I write involving drug usage simply because I know how obsessed with morality modern fandom is and I don't want to have to respond to any "drugz r bad!1!" comments from any purity police.


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